What's On It's a busy week this week with lots of different activities happening...and of course literacy and maths as always is at the core of each week. When the Ministry talks about an hour of writing, an hour of maths and an hour of reading this is spread across the week so some days could be more than an hour of writing and others involve more maths, but as usual we are focused on quality programmes with effective teaching practices in place to personalise learning for all children as much as we can.
Harold the Giraffe and Roshelle arrived on Monday morning with the mobile classroom. The next 3 weeks will see them focusing on healthy eating with all classes.
Pod 3 is in the garden as part of the Garden to Table rotations. Here are Danielle's recommendations for this week. I am thinking about following these for my home garden.
It's that time of the year in the garden where there will be lots of harvesting and using the produce in many different ways. We are also going to start to get the gardens ready for the winter which will mean clearing some of them and planting some green compost and layering them up with mulch, then we leave them to sit. The green compost is in the form of mustard, lupin and wheat, which are all nitrogen replenishing plants. We will cut them when they grow to about 20cm high and leave the cuttings on the garden to decompose as mulch.
While there are a few less vegetables in the garden it's a good chance to investigate the soil and check out the amount of bugs and worms making their home in it.
Today we have Rob Profitt-White and maths lead teachers from other UC schools join our lead teachers, on site for another PLD day in the teaching of mathematics. This is part of our 3rd year in a contract with Learner First. Rob is one of the main gurus the Ministry uses to support the changes in the Curriculum Refresh. The UC primary schools contracted him privately 2 years ago to deliver maths PLD in our schools as we were unable to access Ministry funded programmes (our schools are the wrong decile!). We have loved our 2 years working with Rob and his team and we can see benefits in the engagement, joy and computational thinking and problem solving in our students, and our teachers.
Today Rob assured us that our schools are well ahead of the ball. Shortly the Ministry of Education will be making big announcements about curriculum changes. We are already implementing the majority of the ideas, strategies and learning across the school that will be included in this announcement after our work with Rob over the 3 year period. We just need to stick to our knitting and keep consolidating and further developing what we are doing now.
This is one of the slides Rob used today with the Upper Clutha lead teachers which aptly summarises effective teaching and learning in maths. We will be holding some parent information sessions later in the year to familiarise you with what, and how, your children are learning and doing in their hour of maths each day.
This year the contract work focuses on the strands in maths (e.g. geometry, algebra, measurement, geometry, statistics and probability) and we will further refine the first iteration of our own WPS maths curriculum plan, monitoring, tracking and assessment strategies using the maths progressions (which we are still waiting for the MoE to finalise) and link this into a database for analysing and reporting on student progress and achievement, as well as future developments in our teaching.
Other events this week: - Today there was an assembly to present the Athletics certificates.
- Pod 1 is heading to the Lake Wānaka Centre on Wednesday 10.00 - 11.00am to see the Katie Bee show and in the afternoon on Wednesday Years 3 - 6 will be attending a presentation by an author Steve Mushin (an inventor and author) who Melissa our librarian says is awesome.
- On Thursday 1.30 - 3.00pm we have our Term 1 Tribe Afternoon where Tribe Leaders are asked to step up and lead some activities to prove their abilities to be a Tribe Leader. Please encourage children to wear their Tribe colours as this day is usually one where they really bond together as a Tribe group.
Remember Friday the 22nd is the PUM (Primary teachers paid union meetings). School is open for instruction. Lunch will be at noon on Friday and Subway orders are available and will be delivered at the earlier time. If you are picking up your child early to head away for a long weekend, as Monday 25th March is Otago Anniversary holiday, please pick them up from their classrooms BEFORE 1.30pm. After that they will need to be signed out from the office and you may have to head out into the playgrounds and fields to find them as we will be setting up lots of activities to be led by our senior students and teachers from 2.00 - 2.45pm.
Next week in brief: - Years 5 & 6 will start practising for the EPro8 technology challenge
- Harold and Roshelle here all week
- Wednesday 27th March Central Otago Athletics
- Friday 29th until Tuesday 2nd April School is closed for instruction due to Easter. The first day back to school after this long weekend is Wednesday 3rd April.
Wānaka Primary School Fun Run This is being held on Thursday 11th April. It is a Tribe Day event so please wear your tribe colours! We are inviting children to gather sponsorship for their Fun Run. Sponsors can pledge per lap or make a single payment. Children will run as many laps as they can within a set time.
As always we are fundraising for special projects which this year include - equipment for our makerspaces (these are currently being prebuilt off site and will be placed into their new home beside each pod once they are completed), Garden to Table/ Enviro and some more landscaping at the Pod 2/3 end of the school.
Start Time 10.00am Years 1 & 2 will run for 15 minutes around a 200m course Start Time 11.00am Years 3 & 4 will run for 20 minutes around a 300m course Start Time 11.45am Years 5 & 6 will run for 25 minutes around a 400m course We will remind children to only seek sponsorship from people they know...so watch out granny, grandpa and neighbours. | 
