Week 3 - Visiting Author

This morning Waikowhai Primary was lucky enough to have a visiting author join us for some presentations and workshops. We were privileged to spend time with Des Hunt, an author of 'kiwi stories for kiwi kids' that interweave action, science, and the natural world.

The entire senior school enjoyed the knowledge that Des shared with us.  He started by sharing his background, making a connection with us. Des then cleverly used science concepts, specifically chemistry and physics ideas to illustrate the challenges and successes that he has faced during his writing career.  The way that he approached this problem solving was inspiring and you will see the impact this had on some of us as authors by reading our thoughts on our individual blogs.

Following this, 20 of our senior syndicate students participated in a 90 minute workshop with Des Hunt.  We look forward to the impact that this has on their own writing and the sharing of the learning that they can do with the rest of Te Waka Ako.


We would like to thank Des and his wife Lynne for coming to visit and also Mrs Law and Ms Sands for organising the day. We also have a hot dog sale coming up later in the term that you can support that helps us to get more of these exciting opportunities in school.
Ka kite.

Book Review extravaganzas

Kia Ora Blogging World,

Term Four is upon us.  There is so much for us to fit into this last term of learning for the year.  For the first few weeks of this term, we have been working on book reviews.  Our teachers have helped us to choose a range of interesting novels which we have read and then reviewed.  Over the past couple of weeks, we have reviews parts of these on our individual blogs and uploaded the finished products. There is a link to the template on our reading page here.

Once we had our reviews finished we had the chance to create mixed groups to find out about how our classmates went and what they thought of their novels. We shared our successes, our work areas to work on and whether we would recommend this to our buddies. We shared the presentations digitally so our buddies could then give us positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback through comments. The tasks were challenging and helped us build a deeper understanding of our novel.

 Please check out the individual blogs linked on the side of the page to find out more of what our learners thought too.