Week 7 Newsletter

Wow! Congratulations to the Rippa Rugby team of Celia, Keila, Anna, Kate, Brieanna, Will, Joshua, Padraig, Reuben and Joe in placing 4th at the Regional Finals in Cromwell last week.  This is an awesome result as the teams placing higher all came from much bigger schools - Arrowtown, The Terrace and Remarkables.  A HUGE THANK YOU to Vaughn Healey who has come to school to take practices with the team, to Charlie O'Neill who helped so much at each tournament and of course to all the parents who have been so supportive with transport and encouragement.

Skating: this is coming up in weeks 9 and 10 of the term.  The timetable for this was attached to last week's newsletter. We need transport to and from the ice each day please. This year the junior school will travel by bus, to alleviate the concerns about car seats.  One thing missing from this information sheet was that as a school we require all children in Rooms 1, 2 & 3 to wear helmets and we recommend helmets for Room 4 and 6 for safety.  All students need jackets and hats which may be taken off if too hot, but gloves need to be worn at all times on the ice. To help Mrs Bennie with all the $'s that she needs to sort at the end of the term it would be appreciated if skating money was paid to the office before the last week of term.  If there is an issue with this please contact Mrs Eastwood or myself and alternative arrangements can be made.

Eisteddfods: Some people have already begun preparing for this and have their poems in their homework books - well done to you.  Everyone needs to have a copy of their poem by Friday 21st. Check "Poetry Eisteddfod" Blog entry for marking schedule. The poems chosen are super and I'm expecting a wonderful morning's entertainment on Monday 1st July.

Spelling Alive: The week before last, the class was retested for levels on Spelling Alive - there was a great improvement in skills across the board with some people moving 2 levels.  Well done.  I was excited. I will start everyone on their new levels in the next couple of weeks, as I still want to complete the teaching of  "1 sound = several spelling patterns" across all levels, and catch up with testing those who were absent. In saying this, I am still needing to write quite a few hints in some people's homework books about conducting, tooling and being responsible for checking each night's spelling against the typed words.  I have been told that if a mistake is learned, it takes 28 times of relearning to reprogramme this in our brains, so if a conscientious learner writes it incorrectly each night, that is 4 x 28 = 112 times of relearning to correct it.  Habit of Mind to focus on in Spelling is Accuracy and Precision (make it right). "Do it once. do it right!" This means taking responsibility for checking on our learning.

Maths: At the moment we are working on multiplication and division, with classes cross grouped from Room 3 - 6. We are all picking up new strategies easily, however for some people the lack of knowing tables instantly is now impacting on how they can use these strategies to solve problems. Homework sheets have been tables based, as we all need to smarten up our knowledge. Students can also bring home games to play to help with this knowledge or get into the speed pages on Maths Buddy.

Reading: At present I am Probe testing in readiness for report writing.  I share the results as I go, so ask your child how they went and what they need to work on.  It would be great to see everyone recording their reading in their reading logs.

Morning Programme: Group 2 this week.  Zoe (Our Country) is group leader, Hannah - music, Will - how to, Adriana - introducer/current events, Kahn - poem, Zeph - book review. Morning Programmes have been super - some fantastic ideas that perhaps we could use to make things to sell for the fair in November, wheat bags (Brooke) and photo frames (Eilish).  Thank you girls.

Gmail:
This has now been set up for all of year 6, which means that work can be emailed home to work on, or once I have this sussed, can be worked on, on a google doc where work can be shared and worked on collaboratively. Room 4 saw how this works today as we worked on a document about how students saw "participating and contributing" in action in the school.  This document was set up on a staff shared document and we discovered that Room 6 were also brain storming the idea at the same time.