Te Aroha Primary Newsletter
Term 2 Week 9 2021
Kia ora koutou
Welcome to week nine.
This week we will be celebrating Matariki at our school. Below is a little information about Matariki
What is Matariki?
Matariki is one of the most important Māori celebrations. It signifies the start of the New Year in Māori culture.
Matariki is the name for a star cluster also known as the Pleiades, that rises in late June or early July. It literally translates in English to the 'eyes of god' or 'little eyes'.
When is Matariki?
In 2021 Matariki will be celebrated between 19 June to 11 July.
How is Matariki celebrated?
Traditionally, Māori believed if the Matariki stars were very bright in the sky, this signified a warmer season and more fruitful crops for harvest.
It was seen as an ideal time for ceremonial offerings to the Māori land-based gods Rongo, Uenuku and Whiro to ensure their crops were healthy for the coming year. Matariki was also seen as an important time for family to gather and reflect on the past and the future.
Today Matariki celebrates the unique place in which we live and gives respect to the land we live on. This is celebrated through education and remembering whakapapa (ancestry).
The planting of new trees and crops is done to represent new beginnings.
Celebrations traditionally last up to 3 days after the new moon has risen following the Matariki clusters visibility in the sky.
What are the Matariki stars called?
Matariki is a star cluster, not a constellation. The 9 Matariki stars are called:
Well done to our amazing team who travelled to Paeroa last week. To get through to the semis is a mighty effort. We know you faced some tough refereeing but we are proud of your resilience and great attitudes. A huge thank you to Mrs Diprose, Mrs Paetai and Mr Hubbard for your amazing support of the children on the day.
Thank you to all the parents who helped out with our duties on Saturday and especially Cam Melrose who had the big task of sorting it all out!
Te Aroha and District Museum 50th Birthday and Matariki Celebrations
Wednesday 30 June at 6pm at the Museum (official welcome to everyone)
Karanga to proceed to Future Te Aroha for performances from Te Aroha Primary School's Kapa Haka group, Zac Scott and Rob Thorne (Ngati Tumutumu).
Supper to follow.
Gold coin entry.
Kapa Haka Matariki Performance - Wednesday 30 June
We are very excited to be a part of the Te Aroha District Museum's 50th Birthday and Matariki Celebrations.
Students in our roopu are to meet Mrs B and Matua Rawiri at Future Te Aroha at 5.45pm for a practice.
A special newsletter / panui will be sent home with reminder information.
Our school will be having a special Matariki Assembly on Thursday at 11.50am in our school hall. This will be run by our House Leaders.
Parents and whanau are most welcome to join us to learn about Matariki.
TEACHER PAID UNION MEETINGS AND LEARNING CONVERSATIONS
The NZEI, the union for all teachers in NZ has informed us that they have arranged Paid Union Meetings on Tuesday 6 July starting at 9.30am. This is to discuss the upcoming bargaining for the teachers new Collective Agreement.
There will, therefore, be no school for children on this day but our Learning Conversations will continue as planned starting at 1.00pm when staff will be back at work.
A link for the Learning Discussion booking sheet is found below.
Ngaa mihi nui
Principal / Tumuaki
Key Term Dates
TERM TWO DATES 2021
1. Matariki Celebration at Museum 30 June @ 6.00pm
2. Learning Discussions Mon 5 Jul - 3.30 - 5.30pm
3. Paid Union Meeting on Tuesday morning and Teacher Only Day
Learning Discussions Tues 6 Jul - 1.00 - 6.00pm
4. School Closes for the Holidays 9 July 2021
Classroom Round Ups
Second to last week of term. Time certainly flies by! This week our phonics work is qu, w and x together with blending of 3 letter CVC words. In our literacy work we are talking about vowel sounds and what they are so that we understand that a 3 letter CVC word is consonant vowel consonant. We will be celebrating Matariki this week with school wide activities, stories and art in our class to enhance our learning. We will share our Matariki learning on Seesaw. This week our Maths is focussed on geometric shapes. At this early stage of our Maths learning we need to be able to name basic 2D and 3D shapes, talk about what the shapes look like and recognise them in our environment.
Rm 2 Miss Green
Welcome to Week 9. This week we celebrate all things Matariki.
In writing we are practising using conjunctions to join two ideas. Other students are focusing on writing a sentence independently without teacher support.
Reading words to segment and blend, and heart words to practise writing will be sent home for homework. This is important for students to practise before they read their new book and bring it home to read to you. Please if you have any reading bookmarks laying around at home, can they please be sent back to school.
Maths we will be looking at groupings within 5 and 10, doubles to 10 and another group will be practising addition and subtraction problems to 10 and recording these accurately.
Please check your child’s hair as we have nits going around again.
Rm 3 Miss Swan
Kia ora koutou,
Welcome to Week 9. Room 3 is looking forward to our Matariki celebrations this week.
Reading: Spelling and reading books will be coming home as per usual this week.
Writing: We are looking at creative writing and using our imagination to generate ideas. We are also focusing on compound sentences and what this looks like in our writing.
Maths: We begin our fractions unit by looking at what a half is, using shapes and sets of objects.
Reminders for the week: Please remember homework notebooks and book bags everyday. Room 3 needs their notebook for classwork. We have our Library day on Friday. Please remember you can pop in and see me or contact me via Seesaw and email
I hope you all have a fantastic week!
Rm 5 Miss Entwisle
Our Spelling words this week are all about id and gr. We are becoming experts at Report Writing and are learning to add lots of facts and details into our written work. We are enjoying reading the books we have created using the Chromebooks and Google slides. In Mathematics we continue to look at Multiplication and Division. Our Spelling words are shared each week via the Seesaw activity section. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact me via email at email@example.com or through the Seesaw message function.
Rm 6 Mrs Bankier
Mrs Bartram and Ms Bishop will continue to teach room 6 children until the end of the term.
Rm 7 Mrs Paul
Last week in Maths we had a great time learning to tell the time on both analogue and digital clocks. Thank you to all the parents who helped with this by working on it at home. This week we will be looking at 5 minute intervals, particularly the time after 'half past'. We will also be counting forwards and backwards in time.
In writing we will be finishing our informative writing and heading to opinion writing. Children always have great opinions on things so this should be fun. We will also look to build on our fitness. Cross Country is early in term 2 so we may as well capitalise on all the winter sport fitness and start training. This will be dependent on fitness of course!!! Our growth mindset work last week showed we have a lot of work to do, but we are up to the challenge!!!
Rm 8 Mrs Young
Inquiry - Kaitiaki Guardian Proposals of our school. This week we will turn our proposals into mini models and prototypes. These will be hands-on and also using minecraft and tinkercad online platforms. We have had some awesome proposals from giving the sports shed a visual makeover, playgrounds, worm farms to upgrading and sustaining the room 8 gardens.
Literacy - As a school we are celebrating Matariki this week, Mrs B has shared some awesome resources with us and we look forward to spending time with everyone this week.
Maths - Multiplication and Division unit. Please continue to practice your tables at home.
Hands on - SOAP - We have been busy researching, naming and coming up with Room 8 fragrances. Check out our new soap labels on Seesaw, we will shrink wrap our soap bars this week, photograph these and send them home for everyone to enjoy! Thank you Mr Tee
Online interactive quiz with detailed answers. Please login via https://socrative.com/ Click on Student Login and enter TAPSROOM82021. Whanau can also take part every week!
Home Learning - Library Books + EPIC Reading. Mathletics + Prototec + Weekly Quiz
Rm 9 Mrs Gamble/Mrs Hodgetts.
An exciting week with Mrs B organising lots of whole school celebrations of Matariki. We are looking forward to taking part in these and sharing this with you all.
Inquiry:This week we will continue to complete our inquiry proposals. We will be making models or using mine craft to replicate some of our designs. These are going to be presented to the class alongside each group's movie or slideshow. So we are looking forward to that.
Literacy: We will be working hard to finish our novels. You are very close! Another exciting work of engaging tasks through our shared readings out of the Annual 2. We are going to try and get on as many platforms as possible. In writing we will have some targeted mini lessons based on some of the testing done. Practice our editing skills.
Mathematics: Expanding on last week's learning we will further develop our division knowledge.
Homework: Revision of division and multiplication. 20 minutes reading each day. Weekly quiz. Extra reading and inquiry homework will need to be completed also.
Have a great week everyone.
Rm 10 Mrs Brittenden
Kia ora koutou - Ngā mihi o Matariki, te tau hou Māori.
This week, Rm 10 will be learning about Matariki and will complete a range of Taskboard activities - some of which will be shared via Seesaw.
We also have our Kaitiakitanga proposals to complete and we will be working on our pitch. These are important, in order to "sway" the decision towards the Kaitiakitanga proposal we will undertake in early Term 3. Some really amazing ideas and it is fantastic to see students collaborate and get creative.
- Mrs Robertson will be in Rm 10 on Friday
- please make sure your child has the correct uniform, especially as the weather has been cold lately (lots of different jumpers being worn)
Looking forward to an awesome week.
Me mātau ki te whetū, i mua i te kōkiri o te haere.
Before you set forth on a journey, be sure you know the stars.
Arohanui - Mrs B firstname.lastname@example.org