End of Term Three!

Gosh, the last week was so action-packed, and the half-day on Friday was busy with last-day activities that we did not get our blog done!

Our VIP this week was Caitlin!

And, catching up on a few other VIPs/MVPs that I've missed getting on screen!...



Joshua H

Keryn was an MVP for showing the value of Self-Responsibility

Kobie shares his VIP display

Maddy shares her VIP display

Rhianna earned MVP for showing the value of Honesty

And here she is with her VIP display.

We farewelled Miss Van den Beld and wished her thank you for the work she has done with us and wished her all the best for her teaching career, with a good luck cake and slice. We think she is a fantastic teacher and any school that hires her for next year will be making a good choice!

We also had the grand prizegiving for our Olympic Reading Challenge that has been running through the term - everyone in the class was aiming to earn a medal for their personal reading - there were a range of activities to complete after reading different types of books, each earning different points.

Medal-winners are shown below (every participant won a book as a prize):


DOUBLE GOLD medal winnners (earned 500 or more points)

GOLD medal winnners (earned around 400pts)

SILVER medallists (earned around 300points)

BRONZE medallists (earned around 200 points)

 

Have a happy, safe holidays everyone! Mrs C has been sorting spring cleaning her resource cupboards and shelves! Next on the agenda...planning our awesome learning activities for Term Four! See you then!

Term 3 Week Three

Kia ora!  The last two weeks have again been action-packed as we cram our days with lots of learning and skill-building!

Sarah was last week's VIP

 Our ski trip was the motivation for some writing this week - first we used a circular plan (looks like a pizza) to help us quickly write eight main events that happened to us during the ski trip, which we then used to create the draft of our recount.

The Dahl group were then looking to recraft one sentence from their work - trying to add in details to make it more descriptive for the reader.  What great work they came up with - see some examples on Blogs By Us.

The Mahy group took two of their events in the recount and used the hamburger plan to add more details to each event so that they would be able to create a really descriptive paragraph to extend their main ideas.  The improvements made by using the planner were fantastic and we could really see how the details are important for sharing our experience.  You can also see these on Blogs by Us.

The Rowling group had been working the past two weeks on My Story (writing entries for the NZ Post Young Writer's Contest) and these have been sent away online by Mrs C.  So this week they began writing an informational text titled " What to Expect When You Are Skiing" and they will turn these into posters for next year's skiers to read. These will also eventually be on Blogs By Us.


Hayden was this week's VIP

On Wednesday we hosted the Lower Mataura Valley Schools' Speech Contest for Year Five and Six pupils, with up four pupils each coming along to represent Edendale, Wyndham and Tuturau (we hope all our friends at Glenham are feeling better soon!).

Well done to Maria and Sarah who spoke very confidently and presented their speeches well. We were very proud of you.  Check out some highlights here:

We began miniball skills with Callum from Sport Southland last week and look forward to using these skills in the end of term tournament.

Maria shared her Connected Award activity
- a booklet about her overnight weekend tramp in Fiordland National Park.

We are also excitedly looking forward to performing " Murphy's Marvellous Time Travelling Machine" on stage at the end of the term too! Who will be our star actors, singers and dancers???

The Student Council Master Chef competition started this week - on Friday Nich created a batch of very delicious butter cupcakes as his contest entry. Good luck to Nich and the other seven Year Five or Six contestants! Mrs C is most willing to be taste-tester!!


Nich shows two samples of his cupcakes (the rest had been eaten!)

Our inquiry into why we need to look after our natural resources is well underway with Mr Lloyd Esler coming along to speak to us about the Earth - he had a billions of years old piece of space rock that had been found in South America - probably the oldest item any of us will have a hold of! 

Allynah holds the space rock - it was very heavy for its size!

Finally, more of us have been busy producing Take Two News clips (but a technical glitch meant we have not yet had a chance to edit these) - so we will be sharing these with you soon! E noho ra!

Term Two - Weeks 8 & 9

Hi again everyone!

Our Kokako class has grown again - welcome to Ricci and Allynah who have joined us - we  are thrilled to have new friends with us and look forward to learning more about you as the weeks pass!

Last week we thanked and farewelled Miss Van den Beld as she ended her teacher-training posting.  With her we have enjoyed carrying out some scientific investigations involving mould, putting together our speeches and making some card print robots.  We look forward to the lessons she will provide for us during her five-week posting late in Term Three.



Maddy was the Senior MVP for the value of Compassion!

With only one week left in the term we are gearing up for a break. We have concluded our technology inquiry. Some of our bird feeders were out on trial last week, with the miserable weather conditions showing up some major design faults for our prototypes – all aspects we reflected on this week!

Congratulations to Thomas, who placed third overall in the 11 year-old boys' race at the Southland Primary Schools' Cross-Country last Friday, and to Marina who place 14th in the 10 year-old girls's race - a great effort from you both and a great experience for Jake, Brittany and William as well!

Congratulations also to Sarah (dance), Shaz (piano), Jake and Kobie (dance) and Brittany (and her group - dance) for being finalists in the Student Council's event 'Edendale's Got Talent'.  It was a great show and we are very proud to have so many Kokako pupils sharing their talents -well done to all of you!

Gabby was this week's VIP - thanks for the chocolate
cake Gabby!

Marina was last week's VIP!

This week we will comment on something we enjoyed doing when Miss Van den Beld was here and why...

Term One Week Ten - Oh my gosh!

Oh my gosh! What has, or should we say what has NOT been happening in the past three weeks!

Apologies to our regular followers - to cut a long story short...

In Week Eight Mrs Coyle was on a two-day course in Wellington, fog came down in the late afternoon stranding Mrs Coyle, Mr McKenzie and about two thousand other passengers...Mrs Coyle and Mr McK had to spend an extra day in Wellington waiting for a flight to Christchurch, then a night in Christchurch before getting home on Friday! Only a day and a half later than expected! Thanks to Mrs Shepherd and Mrs Miller for running the class while Mrs Coyle was stuck!

Congrats to Sarah who was awarded the Senior MVP at celebration this week for applying the value of excellence.

Week Nine was our X-factor X-pedition to Camp Columba at Pukerau - two and a half days of X-cellent and X-traordinary efforts from all pupils - see this post and also keep an eye on our You Tube channel for photostories about it, as well as on our personal blogs!

Week Ten has also been a ripper! We will all be ready for our holiday break I can tell you!!

On Tuesday we attended the Sport Southland soccer tournament in Gore, where we had three teams putting into practice the skills we have been learning with Lucy on Tuesdays. It was really cool to have four games each and we all played really well - our skills improved immensely by the fourth game (and we were all pretty tired!)

On Wednesday we were thrilled to have two members of the Southern Steel team (great game on Monday night Steel!!) come along with Maureen from Road Safety Southland to share an important message about seatbelt safety in cars - check out this post to see more!

This was a cool way to end our inquiry - for which we have been busy finishing our individual 'asking further' research questions which we have presented as posters, photostories, PowerPoints or videos. You can see some of our work on our individual blogs.

Today is a half day as we head off for Easter and a well-deserved two week break! Have a good one everybody! Thanks for all the hard work this term - Kokako pupils rock!

Term One - Week Four - BIKEWISE and more!

This week we had two sessions with Constable Graham on the Bikewise Safe Cycling programme - our Tuesday session was a theory discussion in which we learnt about safe cycling and the hazards to look out for...boy, there are a few! In the middle photo above you can see Const. Graham , Shaz and William demonstrating why it is illegal to ride bikes on the footpath - cars coming out of driveways may not see us as we bike along and we could get hit (as we can't always see the cars either!)

All of us learnt something new from Constable Graham in this session and we will put that in our comments for this week.

On Wednesday we used our bikes (and helmets of course) to practice some cycling skills out on the school courtyard. Const. Graham laid out cones in slalom courses and for corners so we could practise the hand signals that we had learnt the day before - it can be quite tricky for some of us to balance our handle bars while lifting one hand up to show that we are turning or stopping! Something for us all to practise!

Other activities this week: we published our stories of what was hiding in our wardrobes -Mrs Coyle is hoping that these were all imaginative as she wouldn't like to meet some of the crazy or scary creatures that we described! We have published on pad paper and made doors on the front with card so they look like wardrobes - come into class and check them out on the wall!

Mrs Shepherd was with us today and we created some collage people in action -we used the shapes of the paper to show the positions of the arms and legs of our paper-people as they carried out all sorts of healthy exercise options such as dance and sports. They look really cool and we will write poems to go with the pictures...watch this space!

We also worked on reading scales showing millilitres, grams, litres and kilograms. Our numeracy maths sessions have been based on fractions or reading/writing large numbers and addition strategies.

This week we also looked at ways that we can be healthy -we still have a session or two to do about this and then we will begin our own investigations into an aspect of keeping healthy or safe.

Congratulations to Keryn, who we voted last week as our Most Valuable Pupil for self-responsibility - you can check out our list of achievements on our wikispace page throughout the year - there will soon be lots of athletics results there with the LMV Athletics planned for next Friday!

Our class VIP (very important pupil) this week was Renee - we learnt that Renee enjoys riding motorcross and has a lot of pets.

This week as part of her Connected Award we had Shaz sharing some magic tricks that she has been practising - Mrs Coyle was totally blown away when Shaz could find the right card in the pack - how did you do it Shaz?!

Tomorrow is our camp fundraiser - our annual Car Boot Sale and Car Wash - fingers crossed for a nice day and a huge turnout of customers - see you all there!