Week 3

Please note the changes to our school athletics and swimming days. Athletics is now on Wednesday

29th February and swimming is now on Wednesday 14th March.

Our school swimming is a time for children to showcase what they have learned in relation to water

safety. Our aim is to ensure that the children are confident in the water, that they know how to stay

afloat and how to keep afloat until help arrives. Once our children can do this they are then taught

swimming skills. During our swimming day we will be using this time to show the skills that the children

have learned. We will also have swimming races for the children that are capable of swimming in race

events. From this we will choose the children to go to the interschool swimming event held in Opunake.

Just a reminder about the bus for the children that get picked up and dropped off at Kapuni and

Stuart Road. If there is no one to pick up the children at these points they will remain on the bus and

return to school. You may have noticed the bus is a little behind schedule at times . This is due mainly

because of road works along Hastings Road again. These road works have been continuing for the last

four years so hopefully they get it right this time and we don't have to put up with it year after year!

Keep Safe, Rick ☺

PS Have you checked out page 6 in the Hawera Star???

Welcome Back

WOW it’s great to be back for 2012. A big welcome to everyone and to all of our new students and their families, great to have with us at Matapu School.
We have some really cool things happening this year. Firstly we have developed Matapu Achievement Progress Booklets (MAP Book) for the children. Each child will have their own MAP Booklet and will use this to track their Reading, Writing, Math’s and Key Competencies. We have developed the MAP Booklets to give the children more responsibility for their own learning. They will now know where they are with their learning journey and their next steps to learning with documented proof. These MAP Booklets will be used next year in our Parent/Teacher/Student interviews, as the children will be running these next year. I will shortly have copies of these booklets on our web page and the teachers will be showing you them during the Feb 28 Parent/teacher interviews.
Our topic studies this year are:
Term 1: Water Safety. Term 2: Native flora and fauna.
Term 3 Olympics and Production. Term 4: Individual investigations
The production will be held on the evenings of 26/27 September keep these dates free!!
Interviews will be held on 28th Feb and 25th July please feel free to come and talk to us at any other time.
Reports will be out on 29th Jun and 7th Dec
Subway orders on 22 Feb and 21 Mar
Year 7-8 Camp 14-17 Feb
School Athletics 1 Mar Interschool Athletics 8 Mar
School Swimming 15 Mar Interschool Swimming TBA
If any dates change we will inform asap.

A big welcome to Natarsha Hey who is the new front office receptionist. Natarsha is working from 8:15 –12:15 daily.

Please can we have the ALL of the children's clothes named. We have piles of lost property every term that we give to the Op shop. It must be costing you a fortune!!!
Swimming is a part of our curriculum the same as reading, writing and maths. It is school policy to swim every day and we expect the children to have their swimming gear everyday. Generally ,if they are too sick to swim they are too sick to come to school, there are a few exceptions to this . If you think that your child should not be swimming please ring the school and talk with me.

It’s great to be back and look forward to working with everyone on our children’s learning journeys.
Keep safe
Rick

MEN@WORK

Our project team for 2011 is in full swing. These boys are all hands kids who love to build things or pull things apart. So we are giving them opportunity at school by using their talents and learning at the same time. The boys this year have identified several tasks around school that they may be able to tackle.

The first job they are taking on is to try and make logs out of recycled paper. We have been spending a lot of money on recycling paper and thought that we could do better. The boys have decided to shred all of the paper and then soak it in water. This will break the paper down and then they are going to design some sort of press to squish the paper into cylindrical logs.

Other tasks identified by the boys as projects for 2011 are:

• Build a community notice board at the front of school


• Construct a green house and shade house for our enviro gardens.


• Raise the rain water tank to allow the enviro team to have presure for watering the garden


• Make covers for the gardens to stop the birds eating the berries


• Putting in a divider in room four for the teacher aides

The boys are also designing their own Blog for you to keep up with their efforts. I will have the link available with the other class blogs when this is completed.

Red and Black

The children held a Red and Black day of Friday to raise money for the people of Christchurch. Students and teachers all dressed in red and/or black for the day as these are Canterbury colours. Our thoughts are with the people of Christchurch and wish them a speedy recovery in both body and mind. The children had a gold coin donation and they also made coconut ice (red and black), fudge and waffles to sell. In all the children raised $377.30 for the day. Well done guys great community spirit and helping our fellow countrymen. We never know when we may need a helping hand!

Week 4

This week we have had a lot going on. Wednesday saw our parents coming in to talk to the teachers about the children's progress towards their goals, where to next and how they can help at home.These sessions are a very important part in the child's schooling. Parental support plays a major role in how the child performs at school and their attitude to learning.

We also had the inter-school athletics on Thursday at Kaponga. A huge thank you to the Kaponga Athletic Club for organising the day. There were six schools competing on the day and the competition was fierce. Our children did extremely well and all gave 100% effort which is all we can ask.

Keep an eye on what's happening below to keep up to date on what is going on at school.

Councillors 2011

Congratulations to our 5 new councillors for 2011. They ran a very clean and hard fought campaign.

Well done:

Hamish

Ella

Caitlin

Bailey

Krissie

Your work has only just begun!!!

Week 3

The Information Saturation stage of our topic study is going well. The children are learning all about their bodies and how they work. I was informed by some children that they had 38 'heart beeps' per minute. Some have been looking into the body using online sites that allow you to peel away the layers to reveal what is beneath. We have one more week of info saturation then the children will be looking into their own inquiries into our bodies.

The swimming pool was finally able to be opened this week. Wooohooo. We have been upgrading the pool over the holidays and ran into a few problems. However we are swimming now, so children will need their togs every day. Swimming is part of our curriculum just like reading, writing and maths. This means that if the child is too sick to swim they are too sick to come to school.

We had a great Friday night with many families coming for a swim, shared BBQ and a meet and greet with the teachers. A great time was had by all and I even got in for a swim so the pool can't be that cold!!!