Week 6: Assembly on Winter Warmers Friday

This week it was Manukau's turn to host our school assembly. It is a great chance for us to share all the cool things that we have been learning about with our school community. It is also the time where we get to work on our clear speaking and strong voices for our audience. This skill is especially important as we want to share our ideas clearly with audiences of different sizes. Here is the slideshow of the different things we shared. Manukau did a super job.



It was an extra special assembly because it was also a mufti day at school where we all dressed up in our warm winter clothes. The mufti day donations will contribute to our winter warmer hampers this year. Another great example of the citizenship of the Waikowhai students and school community, helping out where we can.  Below you can see us in action in during Jump Jam in our winter warm clothes.

We would love any feedback you have.  Please feel free to leave a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment, maybe ask us more about what we shared in assembly.

Week 5 - Skip Camp

In Week 5 the Year 5 and 6 students from Waikowhai Primary travelled to Mount Ruapehu for our ski camp.  We were away from school from early Tuesday morning until late Friday evening and we had a fantastic time.

Our first day was mostly travel. This involved stops at Hamilton Gardens for a scavenger hunt, tin Otorohanga to investigate the Sir Edmund Hillary walkway, Taumarunui school for a stretch of our legs and afternoon tea, then we got to our accomodation.  It was freezing and after a delicious dinner we went for an evening walk.


Wednesday and Thursday were our days on the mountain.  The first day was full of challenges and extremely hot but we got there.  The second day we put our skills to use and improved heaps.


Friday was our trip back, we left early for a hot soak in Taupo, then a quick stop to view the powerful Huka falls before travelling back to Auckland via another Hamilton Garden stop.


To find out what we thought about our trip check out our individual blogs.  We have posted a camp booklet each that shares our reflections and the things that happened. There are some of these in the post.


We would to hear what you think about our camp experience too, maybe you could share some of the things that you have been on.

The Marshmallow Challenge - Welcome back

We are really excited to be back at school this term. Today we welcomed a new group of Year 4 students to Te Waka Ako.  As part of getting to know each other Mr Riceman set us up a design challenge to start the morning.  It is called the marshmallow challenge, and you can read more about it here.https://www.tomwujec.com/design-projects/marshmallow-challenge/

A quick summary is that you have a few resources to use to create the largest possible tower that stands by itself with a marshmallow on top.  It was a great way for us to connect with new buddies and use our key competency skills to work in a group.  You can see above some of the creative design efforts that we came up with.

We would love some feedback from you.  Also, if you have any questions, please ask us in the comment box below.  Thanks for reading!

Blog you later.

A fitting end to Term One

At the end of Term One, Waikowhai Primary School held a special assembly to acknowledge ANZAC day. This is because it will happen while we are away from school on our school holiday break.

As you can see, the school hall was set up beautifully by Ms Sands.  A poppy garden was created at the front of the hall.  Children from each class came up to lay poppies in remembrance.  We displayed the crosses honouring fallen soldiers from our ANZAC centenary presentations two years ago at the front of the class.

A group of our Senior students helped by sharing a little bit of information about ANZAC day with younger members of our school community.  We also listened to the last post, observed a minute's silence and used our fabulous singing voices together as a special way to finish of the term.  We then finished the assembly as a syndicate while Ms Sands read us an ANZAC related picture book. You will be able to find this in the sophisticated picture book section of the library.

Room 8 focused on some ANZAC activities during the week.  One of the highlights was the creation of acrostic poems.  Below you can see the shared writing that Room 8 did before we went to create our own from the word bank below.

We would love to hear how you acknowledged ANZAC day.  Please leave us a positive, thoughtful or helpful comment in the comments section below.

Rippa Rugby Success

Waikowhai Primary have had success at the recent Central Zone Rippa Challenge Cup!  We are so excited to say that the top team are the champions for 2017!  It was a fabulous day and both teams had a ball, starting the day with plenty of wins during the pool play.

Team 1 continued on to win all of their games for the day. A fantastic achievement to come first out of the 26 teams that were competing on the day. The final was very close against Dominion Road.  At full time it was 8 all.  Waikowhai won the game because they scored the first try.  Team 2 also had a fantastic day out, scoring lots of tries and working together as a team.

Here is a snapshot of some of the action from the day, including super teamwork and a try scored by Waikowhai.  We would like to thank all of our supporters and parents who helped transport, encourage and hydrate us on the day! Congratulations to Jordan and Conrad who also showed super tidy kiwi skills, keeping the venue tidy and earning themselves some rugby balls to develop their skills more too.




We can't wait to compete in the championship against the other qualifiers from the Auckland Region.  Go Waikowhai!

Monday Maths Madness

Our week started with a mathematical bang!  We spent our morning block immersed in a range of different math problems.  We split into groups across the senior syndicate and got our brains into gear while we tried to solve a variety of different problems.  Best of all we had loads of equipment to use to investigate and work out these problems.  Here are a few of the action shots from the day.

Experimenting with Electricity

Waikowhai Primary Senior Syndicate welcomed in the new term with an afternoon of fun and learning.  We have continued to focus on electricity within the context of integrity and spent the first afternoon of the term collaborating with others from different classes using the "Brain Box" circuit kits. We collaborated, concentrated, did some learning and created some circuits from the book as well as our own special creations.  We have taken and filed photos to create a DLO to then share out our learning using our individual blogs.  Please check these out to see what we have found out so far.