Tui class @ Pompallier Catholic School

 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.