Tui class @ Pompallier Catholic School

  Te Hiku Manaiakalani Outreach 2 Film Festival 2020 Our theme for the movies this year was “Life in Lockdown” The movies have been played on the big screen at the Te Ahu Cinema in Kaitaia on Monday 19 October 2020. This is one of the lucky movies to be chosen from our school. Congratulations to everyone involved in the production of this movie. Please click on the link to view other Te Hiku Film Festival movies . Please enjoy and feel free to leave a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment below for the students.

  Don't be a water waster! This week Tui's kindness challenge it to not be a water wasters. Tui had to reflect on questions like: - What areas of the world DON'T have access to clean water? South Sudan, Dubai, Third World Countries, India, Africa - Why? These countries are less fortunate, pollution, drought, hot land (desert), don't infrastructure  -What can we do? Stop polluting, eco-friendly, don't abuse our access to water - be water conscious, fix leeks, reduce bad habits with water (long showers), donate to help those less fortunate. BIG QUESTION: How does this change the world? It can help people live healthier and longer lives, help people who are less fortunate and face struggles in life, it can help the environment, we need to make sure that ALL have access to clean water especially those that are sick and in need of clean water.  When you do things to help others, you encourage others to do the same.  We are now more mindful of the importance of clean ...

 What a FUN activity!! Miss Slattery read 'The very noisy bear' by Nick Bland to us and we LOVED to story!! We then found out that we were going to make musical instruments from recycled materials that makes a noise like a bear.  Boy we had so much fun! We worked with a partner which was great. We first had to gather the materials we were going to use then we started sketching our designs and thinking about how we were going to put it all together. Construction of the instrument was by far the best part and then we got to share them with our family of learners and see what others had created.  We had so many awesome instruments and we are created something different and they all made different sounds.  We worked on our super skills (4C's) and reflected on how we went and what skills we used to complete our instruments.

 Now that we are in level 2 we are trying to social distance and keep our bubbles as small as possible. This means that we haven't been able to gather as a whole schooln so instead we have been having assemblies via Google Hangouts in our classrooms. Each class connects to the Hangout and then we are able to connect with our school and our whanau are able to connect to it too which is really awesome!  This means we have been able to celebrate all the amazing things happening around our school and in the classrooms. During assemblies teachers always give out value awards, and we have still been able to receive these which is so cool, it makes things a little bit more normal.

 Sharing knowledge has been something we have been incorporating heavily into our classroom. With it being Matariki we chose some experts in the classroom to share their knowledge about Matariki with us. Kaycee is so passionate about her Maori culture and has been leading our Matariki lessons as she we view her as an expert on the topic. Kaycee read 'Seven Kites of Matariki' to use and we discussed what the seven kites represent and mean. We have loved being able to share knowledge with one another and lead lessons in the classroom. We appeciate all the knowledge we as students hold and we value that we are all experts in different areas.

 Today during mindfulness we wrote compliment letters to one another. We chose a name out of our name cup and then had to write a compliment letter to that person.  Once we wrote our letters we exchanged them and then reflected in our mindfulness journals about how these compliments made us feel. It was so amazing to exchange these thoughts and feelings with our family of learners.  This activity was such a huge success and all the love was felt for the rest of the day. 

 This term we have started working on lots of open ended math activities. These link to what our math focus or area is.  With these questions we are using the 4'C to make sure we are really thinking deeply about the questions. It is so great to be able to work with others and have great conversations about the question and how we have each interpreted it.  This week our focus is measurement and one of the open ended questions was ' How many ways can you draw a 15cm line'. We really had to think about this and how do we make sure the line is 15cm. We also had to build two different towers that were the exact same hight, this involved creative thinking as we used materials to build our towers. These activities have really helped us to understand our math topics as we are able to explore it in different ways. 

 COVID has been an obstacle that we have been able to overcome. It has been so wonderful to connect with our family of learners online and check in with how we are all going. Every morning at 8:30 we have our morning hangout, we all connect to the call and check in with whats on for the day. We then access all learning tasks through our class site, we choose what choice-board activities we want complete each day. At 13:00 we have our workshop hangout where we have a mini lesson each day on different topics. This is great as we are able to extend our learning and share what we know about the topic. We have also had whole school assemblies on hangouts where we have been able to celebrate all the amazing online learning that has been happening all around the school. It was so cool to be able to see other school whanau that we haven't been able to see during lockdown. Even though it has been a very difficult time it has been so great to be able to have some consistency and continue wit...

Over the last 7 weeks we have been practicing our swimming skills and preparing for swimming competitions. We have perfected all our strokes such as free style, breast stroke, back stroke and some butterfly. Each of us has worked really hard on improving our swimming and making sure to work hard on our starts and finishing. Diving was a big focus during our lessons, we needed to make some changes with our diving positions so that we could improve our starting positions so that we could put ourselves in a good position to win our race. We have improved a lot over the last seven weeks of practice and have become awesome swimmers.

As a whole class on Friday we discussed what blessings God has given us. Fist we thought about these blessings then we shared them with the class and added them to the brainstorm on the whiteboard. Each person in the class shared at least one thing that God has blessed them with. Miss Slattery wrote all our blessings on the whiteboard for us to reflect on. God has blessed us with so many different blessings such as; friends and family, nature, food, the world, animals, shelter, our senses and our individual talents. We discovered that God has blessed us with so many different blessings and we are lucky to have all these different things in our lives. We are grateful for the blessings God has given us.

Yesterday we completed Day 16 of our class Kindness Challenge. Our challenge was to write down three things that we are proud of, throughout the day we thought about things that we are proud of. During lunch Miss Slattery wrote all of our names on the white board, we then had to write the three things that we were proud of under our names. As a class we have decided that the three things we are most proud of are: 1. Swimming (because we have all tried our best and never gave up) 2. Our Sentence of the day (it has helped us develop our writing) 3. Our work in Math (developed our number sense, we have had the opportunity to work collaboratively with our peers, we have learnt about different strategies we can apply to math problems)

As a class we have been setting ourselves with a daily kindness challenge.  Every morning we sit and discuss the challenge for the day. We unpack it and decide on what sort of things we can do to complete the challenge.  There have been some really hard challenges but we are making sure we complete them all as this helps us change the world and helps make it a much kinder place.