The Stars of Matariki

This week marks the Maori New Year celebration of Matariki. It is a time for whanau to enjoy being together, share stories, plant winter crops, and make plans for the future.

What a great time we had this week celebrating with our wonderful buddy class and presenting at today's assembly. The children absolutely sparkled as we performed the Matariki Makarena. Our friends from the Court Theatre reminded us on Wednesday that Matariki is a time for whanau to come together to look after our people, land, and small creatures who are in our care. 
We also loved sharing a hot chip lunch with our buddies. Yum! 

What are looking forward to this year? Who and what is it that you care for in your life?  Could you plan a special whanau night to enjoy being together this weekend? Have fun and let us know what you did to connect with your family!

  

Mara'fun Winner

Here we come Rio!

We have some talented sportspeople in Room 15 - congratulations to Cadell who won the 7 & 8 year olds 2km race in the Mara'fun race as part of the Christchurch Marathon on Sunday. He ran a very fast time of 7:57mins. Here's a pic of Cadell and his brother receiving their awards. Well done boys!

Talking About Maths with Maths Talk

We have been busy learning about multiplication and division strategies in maths this term. We do this through problem solving, which involves working collaboratively with a maths mate to solve real life problems and then sharing our thinking back as a class or in a small group. This gives us a chance to see a range of different ways of solving problems and it also means that we have to have a deeper understanding in order to share our thinking with each other.
One of today's problems was: 20 Mighty Minnows children turned up to watch Hoon Hay's Got Talent. Miss Turner told them to sit 4 to a seat. How many seats did she have to put out?

Maddison and Bella show us how to make 5 groups of 4.
5x4=20 so 20÷4=5

Cadell and George discuss their ideas

We love having Mrs Dent challenge us all!

Its been great to welcome Mrs Dent into our room to share her ideas with us. We hope she can come again sometime soon. 

Actors in the Making

For the last three weeks our reading programme has consisted of practising and performing plays. The children are not in their normal reading groups but enjoy working with others in their class. They mostly learn about working in with each other, listening to others and making their play come alive for the audience.

Our younger brothers and sisters were invited for the performance - the best seats in the house!

A full crowd gathers for the big day!

We had a great turnout from the parents and grandparents who were thoroughly entertained by the first bird election, Santa getting caught in a trap, what happens when you mix a pirate film with a robot movie, a great bank robbery and humans meeting aliens!

Super Structures

John came to Hoon Hay School from Science Alive to teach us about structures. First we looked at a variety of photos of structures from around the world such as the Canterbury Castle, Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Leaning Tower of Pisa and a windmill. We talked about how the structures were made and how stable and strong they are. We also talked about foundations so the structures are safe.
We then used teamwork, by working in groups, to read and complete our structure challenge. Take a look at our photos - you will see the instructions for the variety of challenges and how we worked as teams to build our super structures! We thought it was AWESOME and INCREDIBLE because we got to choose our own cards (challenges) and we talked a lot about our ideas before we got started. The creating and building was so much fun!
We did find it a little stressful at times because we were on a time limit to create our super structures. It was a good challenge for us. We felt proud of the way we worked in teams and with our finished product.

Stand Up and Speak Up

At Hoon Hay we aim to promote students’ understanding that everyone has a role to play in preventing and responding to bullying situations. To reinforce this message we would like you, as parents/caregivers, to take a look at the links below and have a conversation with your child/ren. This fits in nicely with the Keeping Ourselves Safe Programme.

For more information, please check out the resources on-line by clicking here and also have a look at Officer Duncan's Top Tips To Combat Bullying

We all want our children to be safe and happy at school.  Our goal is to ensure that it is safe for children to:

Stand up and speak up together,

because we’re worth it.

If these conversations prompt anything you are concerned about, as always, the Hoon Hay School door is always open.  We want to know!

Woodend Camp Fun

What a fantastic time we had at camp and what a great way to kick off Term 2. The weather was amazing and everyone had great time. Thank you so much to Liz, Ben, Paul, Vanessa and Craig for coming along and working so hard. Here are some highlights of all the activities!