Junior News

By Felicia Ward | Posted: Thursday September 24, 2020

The end of term is always a busy time, with this one being no different. There has been huge excitement with the opening of the new playground. It has been great to see the students spending many hours enjoying it.

Our big focus this term has been on our PBL (Project Based Learning) hospital rebuild project. It is fantastic to see children loving the PBL process and showing a keenness to share their new learning with others. We are now beginning to think about making our final products which we will finish at the beginning of next term. We look forward to sharing these with you then, but in the meantime remember to keep up to date by checking Seesaw, in particular your child’s design journal.

Over the last two weeks, we have had Constable Ross in to deliver the Keeping Ourselves Safe programme. Each class has had four sessions covering a range of safety skills that the children can use when interacting with others and things to do in an emergency. We encourage you to chat with your child about what they have learnt.

We have also enjoyed having Ben, Molly and Josh from Otago Polytechnic visit to take us through some fundamental skills sessions. Each session is based on a movement skill such as running, jumping, skipping, catching and throwing, with the aim of promoting physical activity and sports’ participation at a young age. We are already beginning to notice an improvement in student coordination. We look forward to continuing these skills next term.

Next term we are looking forward to our arts rotation which will involve each class working with each of the junior teachers on a different area of the arts curriculum such as dance, drama, visual art and music. We will also have another block of swimming with JC Swim School, starting on the 9 November. A permission form with more information will be sent home early next term.

Lastly, we say farewell and thank you to our third year teaching students, Miss Jones (Room 9) and Miss Dowling (Room 10) who have spent the year with us. We wish them both all the best as they start their teaching careers!

Have a well deserved holiday and we look forward to seeing you all in Term 4!

Many thanks

Junior Teachers

Classroom Updates

Room 7 

Every day we do show and tell and someone shares their news. And for PBL we do interactive art. And at maths time we do fractions and times tables.

By Quinn Hill

In our classroom we have been doing work on writing. If you don’t know what that is, well it is where we can pick what we want to write about and don’t show Miss Bolger. Yesterday after school I played Netball and Miss Bolger was coaching and I scored three goals. The end score against Columba was 6-0.

By Lucy Devereux

Room 8 

We have been super lucky lately to have a range of visitors come in and speak to Room 8. For our PBL we have had Martha’s mum, Maria a dietician come and speak to us about eating healthy and we have also had some experts from Cloudcannon come and teach us how to build an app. We are really excited to be able to share our app with you all soon! Room 8 have also loved having Josh and Ben take us through some PE skills for the last few weeks, we are all getting better at dribbling a soccer ball.

Room 9 

This term we have been super busy doing PBL. PBL stands for Project Based Learning. We made a huge marble run down to Room 10. We have been building 3D models for the new hospital rebuild. We have been coding robots. We think coding the robots are good becuase they can carry really useful things around the hospital like blood tests, medicine and so on. A really special police officer has been talking about keeping ourselves safe. The police brought a TV for use to watch how to be safe. We have done a little bit of Funky Friday. We have made puppets, bookmarks etc. We also have been doing fundamental skills like bouncing and catching, throwing, hopping, running and so on. We have been making our stories more interesting so the readers will be excited. Last week was Māori Language Week. We have been making Māori fish hooks. We have been really busy. 

By Htin Bhone Pyaet Kyaw 

Room 10 

Over the last few weeks, Room 10 have been busy creating their final product for the hospital rebuild project, as part of PBL. We have created an interactive diorama wall based around a fairy tale theme. We have also retold our fairy tales, learning how to storyboard and create an audio, using “Seesaw” and QR Codes.

Our lovely Student Teacher has been taking us for dance and we have learnt some cool moves to go with a modern song. For maths, we have also been learning about “Weight” and how to measure the weight of objects using balance scales. Finally, as part of Maori Language Week, we learnt how to say our colours in Maori, as well as the Days of the Week, the Seasons, and Part of of Our Body. Now it is time to have a well deserved rest over the holidays!

Room 11 

Room 11 is now up and running with 5 fabulous learners all eager to learn. For the past 3 weeks we have been learning about how to be at school. We can listen and follow instructions. We can read from our book boxes. We love to sing and dance every day before home time. Our favourite song is Threw it out the window.

Constable Ross has been helping us learn about how to keep safe. Soon there will be 12 of us in Room 11 after the holidays.

Room 12

For our Project Based Learning in Room 12 we have been looking at Wayfinding. Our driving question for this term is "How can we make it easy for people to get to where they need to go quickly and efficiently?” Over the last couple of weeks we have been designing signs that could be used in the Dunedin Hospital re-build. The Room 12 students have used a variety tools such as chalk drawing, pencil sketching and design apps. This week the children have been busy making 3-D prototypes of their signs. We look forward to sharing these finished products with friends and whanau next term. 

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