Middles News
By Amy McBeath | Posted: Thursday August 11, 2022
"Ki te wātea te hinengaro, me te kaha rere o te wairua, ka tāea ngā mea katoa" - Ngapo Wehi "When the mind is free and the spirit is willing, anything is possible"
‘Paws for Reading’ Book Week
What a fun week we had celebrating reading. It was great to have the opportunity to share some of our special books from home, listen to different teachers read, explore ideas in different books, and spend time with a buddy class on a reading-related activity.
We began Paws for Reading by watching an interview with Norman Bridwell, the author of the Clifford the Big Red Dog series. Our syndicate listened to Norman talking about his struggles as an illustrator early on in his career. He took his work to lots of different publishers who gave him the same message - that his illustrations were not very good. He didn’t give up and continued to try and get his work recognised. It wasn’t until one publisher suggested he try writing the story for the illustrations, that he found success. Norman’s stories of Clifford the Big Red Dog have now become known worldwide, made into a TV series, and a movie. He is also the illustrator of the stories, despite being told initially that his illustrations weren’t good enough. We talked about how Norman Bridwell demonstrated lots of our KAIK values - to be the best we can be, to be a life long learner, to work hard.
As part of 'Paws for Reading', we also spent time exploring Joy Cowley’s Greedy Cat stories. We built on the ideas that we have been working on as part of our whole school focus on structured literacy. This involved looking through some of the stories to identify different spelling patterns, language structures, looking at verbs, and how different suffixes (word endings) change the tense. Children enjoyed working together to search through the books for different sounds, punctuation, and rewriting sentences from the stories to practise different structures and ideas.
Cross Country
We are so proud of everybody for giving the school cross country a go last week. The weather was perfect and everybody gave it their best effort. While it has been a while since we’ve had a whole school cross country event, and there were a few nervous children before each race began, they can all give themselves a pat on the back for participating. Well done to the top year 4s who also competed in the Hills Cluster Cross Country this week.
PBL
Our PBL (project based learning) for this term is going to be explored through the arts. Our driving question is ‘How can we as creators, tell a story through the arts?’
We look forward to learning about each discipline (drama, dance, sound arts, and visual arts) and exploring how we might be able to tell a story through these. If you have a particular strength in one of these and would be happy to share your expertise with us, we would love to hear from you. Our PBL will also link to our upcoming production at the end of this term.
Keeping Ourselves Safe
Next week, we will begin our Keeping Ourselves Safe sessions with Constable Ross. Constable Ross will come in over the next two weeks and take four sessions with each class. Between these sessions, each class will be working on follow-up activities and sessions. The following is a summary of the programme from the parent section of the Keeping Ourselves Safe website.
What will children learn?
They will learn:
to work out when their safety is at risk
how to keep safe when they meet and mix with other people
who and how to ask for help if they, or someone they know, is being abused
to go on asking for help until someone does something to stop the abuse
that it is important to make and follow personal, family and school safety rules.
They will know:
that abuse is never okay
that abuse is never their fault.
Noho ora mai,
Amy McBeath, Jill Kumar, Portia Parmenter
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