Year 7 News

It was an excellent term with an ARTS focus, with many of our Year 7 students taking part in our successful production - Jungle Fantasy.

In class students and teachers are really enjoying the activities to celebrate the Arts with class rotations, Year 7 Sasa and our Ballet sessions with an educator from the Royal New Zealand Ballet. It is a chance for some students to shine in areas they have strengths - as dancers, musicians and actors.

All of the Year 7 group have been working on a Samoan sasa and will be planning their own class one to perform at an assembly later this week. 

Our students are now underway with our PBL selecting an area to focus on for their performance or storytelling book creating.

Another highlight this term has been our literacy programme with our focus on speeches. Not only is this an important writing component, it ties in with performance through oral language. Speaking in front of a large group is a challenge for many and we have been so impressed with the effort and quality of the presentations from our students. We congratulate those who made it through to the speech finals! 

Over the last three weeks, our Year 7 classes were lucky to have our EOTC Term Four event take place. Our Year 7 students were challenged to complete a number of rock climbing courses at Long Beach.. Check out some of our amazing photos from the day.

At Long Beach each class was split into three rotations. One group was on the Rock climbing under the tuition of Tim or Ben  from Dunedin Adventures. They were trained for the safety aspects and fitted out with their harness and gear. There were five different rock climbing challenges and students had the opportunity to gain confidence with easier climbs before tackling more challenging ones. It was fantastic to watch the students succeed and push themselves on the rock wall.

The second group was taking part in a number of beach challenges such as beach relays, games and for some a "marble" run sand sculpture challenge - making and constructing a sand run for a golf ball to see how far it would go. This was great for teamwork and engineering - to various degrees of success!

The third rotation was a team challenge also - where puzzles had to be solved to receive a map and clues to the cave. Hidden pretend money in the cave had to be found to exchange for the clues to find out where the "treasure" was buried.

We would like to say a huge thank you to all the parents and caregivers who helped on these trips - without you we would not be able to offer these opportunities for our students.

Finally, once again as our year seems to be flying by, we would like to thank all of our whanau, families and caregivers for your ongoing support to both your child and our school programmes. 

Ngā mihi nui

Lisa Dixon