Year 7 news March 2018

The Year 7 crew have had an awesome Term 1.  Becoming a class community, developing our identity, showing the Balmac school values in a variety of settings.

One of our highlights has of course been school camp  at Waihola.  We were all so impressed with the perseverance and determination displayed on the Millennium Track.  This hike is a lot of up hill followed by a lot of down hill and quite a bit of mud along the way! This 13km hike is a great way to start the camp.

The 2nd day at camp is focused around team building activities and challenges and these vary from zooming down the zip line, using archery skills to hit a target, initiative and confidence courses and general group brain teaser and challenge activities. 

A highlight for many was the last days activity of geocaching; Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity, in which participants use a GPS receiver  to hide and seek containers, called "geocaches" or "caches", at specific locations marked by coordinates all over the world. It was a very awesome activity! 

As always, our school camps and EOTC adventures cannot go ahead without the help of our parent community - a big thanks to all of our parent helpers! 

Trips to Arai te Uru Marae and Toitu Otago Settlers Museum have also been taking place to add to our understanding of our culture, identity and belonging to a community.  These trips have been very rich and valuable to add to our students understanding of our term 1 topic of Turangawaewae.  Our focus with topic work will continue with their first taste of an Inquiry Aspire project and developing an idea that represents them and their identity.  There will be a showcase of their learning in Week 10. More details to follow. 

We are really looking forward to meeting you all next week for a face to face conversation about your child and their learning and how they have settled into the Balmac way of life. 

As always, thank you for your support.

Beth Downie and the Year 7 team.