Nga Puawaitanga Team

Term Four Newsletter 2017

Years 5/6

Tena koutou katoa Parents and Caregivers,

A very warm welcome to Term Four. It will be a busy action packed nine week term with lots of opportunities to challenge and stimulate your children as they continue their learning journey.

Not only is it the last term of the year but it is the last term for our Year 6 Students who will be moving off to High School.  Their time at Kerikeri Primary School is coming to an end however there will still be an expectation that students will continue to stay focused, persevere with their learning and work to the best of their abilities.  We consider their final term at Primary School is an important one, to make sure they are well prepared for High School.

Below is a brief overview of our learning programme for Term Four:

Our Inquiry - Our main inquiry this term is ‘Enterprise’.  The key questions that will drive this inquiry will be ‘What is enterprise?’ And ‘How can I be a successful entrepreneur?’  This inquiry lends itself well to  the Social Studies and Technology strand  of the curriculum.  Students will explore values like Community and Participation, Ecological Sustainability, Curiosity, Integrity and Innovation.  During the term the students will work through a process where they develop a product(s) that will be sold at their shop on our Market Day.

Literacy - Listening, Viewing, Reading and Writing - We will continue to focus on all the core skills that the students need to understand and utilise at Year 5 & 6.  For example in Reading they will be given opportunities to identify the main idea in a text, locate and summarise information, infer ideas and information from a text, ask relevant questions and other skills all with the intention of further developing their Reading omprehension strategies.  All this will be catered for using a range of reading material.

In Writing students will continue to experience writing in different genres.  They will be given opportunities to further develop their knowledge and skills about the deeper features of writing like ideas, structure, sentences, vocabulary and language features.  They will also continue to develop the important skills of accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Te Reo Maori is a key feature of our Curriculum.  We will endeavour to use Te Reo more frequently in the classroom and aim to have the  students able to: respond physically to classroom instructions (for example, “Haere mai”); use the question “He aha te kupu Māori mō …?” (“What is the Māori word for …?”) to find out new vocabulary from their environment; and to continue to master the correct pronunciation of Maori language.

Mathematics this term will focus on Multiplication, Division, and Measurement - Volume and Capacity.  We will continue to help and encourage students to develop speed and accuracy with all their basic facts knowledge.  Now is the time to learn them.  High School will be expecting them to know them when they arrive next year.  We will also be aiming to get as many students as possible to Stage 6 and beyond, of the Numeracy stages.

Physical Education this term the students will be  involved in  developing their Athletics skills like sprinting, long jump, high jump, discus and shot put.  This will culminate with an Athletics Day at the end of the year. We will also be running fitness sessions for 15 minutes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.  We are fortunate to have some outside facilitators coming to school to run sessions with classes.  These include Cricket, Golf and the instructors from Top Energy who will be taking classes through a ‘dry land’ water safety programme.  In mid November we will start swimming sessions in the school pool, providing it is warm enough.

Health  This Term our Health Programme will be supported by the Life Education Caravan and Community Police Constable Rob Drummond.  The Life Education Programme will focus on  Relationships and Communities and will also consider the question of ‘what does digital citizenship mean to me?’  Constable Rob will be delivering the ‘Choices Programme.  The content focus for this is to:

• identify positive things about themselves

• gain knowledge of what constitutes a drug and the consequences of drug use
• learn to make responsible decisions for themselves related to drug use
• develop a range of strategies to manage situations in which they may be pressured to use drugs
• identify how to have fun without the use of drugs

Our Art focus this term will be the Visual Arts.  This will link in with our Enterprise Inquiry and will be applied when students consider how they will market their product(s).

Below is a list of events and dates for this term:

Week Beginning	Event
Week 1  16/10/17	Hats - All students must wear a blue school hat at break times. Life Education and Choices Programme commence. PAT Tests begin - Mathematics, Reading Vocabulary and Reading Comprehension
Week 2  23/10/17 (22/10/17 is Labour Day)	Learner Led Conferences - Tuesday/Wednesday.  Writing assessment PAT tests continue.  Lucky Book orders close Friday 27th October
Week 3  30/10/17	Tuesday 31st Monster Mash.  Cricket coaching begins.  1st November Year 6 students have orientation visit to KKHS
Week 4 6/11/17
Week 5  13/11/17	Golf coaching begins
Week 6  20/11/17
Week 7  27/11/17	Year 6 Graduation Assembly on Wednesday the 29th at 6pm
Week 8  4/12/17
Week 9  11/12/17	Tuesday 12th  Year 5&6 Athletics Day.  Last week of school.

We look forward to seeing you during the term.

Kind regards,

Michael Baty   Nga Puawaitanga Team Leader