Over the past few weeks, our learners have been busy exploring many exciting learning experiences. They had a fantastic time watching the Grease Young production at the Due Drop Events Centre. The lively singing, dancing and acting made the performance enjoyable and memorable.

In writing, students have been practising how to use speech marks for direct speech and adverbial phrases to add details about when, where and how something happens. In mathematics, they have been learning to represent tenths/hundredth as fractions and decimals and understand the importance of place value. It has been wonderful to see our learners participating enthusiastically and growing in confidence.

Kia Ora Whanau. What an amazing week we had with awesome events throughout week 5 – ‘Tongan language week and book character dress up day’.

Thankyou to whanau who put efforts in dressing up their child in Tongan attires and in costumes for book character dress up day. Attached are some clicks from week 5.

Thankyou.

Tukutuku tamariki enjoy doing animal play. Today they had a race  with their favourite animal costumes.

Our year two tamariki – Anna, Soraya, Hinemoa and Luca have spent their digital time today creating a two truths, one lie project on Explain Everything (EE) App.  They had to choose two items that were true and one that wasn’t.  Take a look at what they created and shared below:

This week we had the absolute pleasure of celebrating Tongan Language Week here at WPS, and wow, did it pop off!

We kicked things off with a beautiful opening assembly, where our Junior Pasifika students put on some amazing performances and helped set the tone for a fantastic week of celebrating Tongan language, culture and traditions.

Throughout the week, students had the chance to get involved in a range of fun activities held during lunchtime. There was lots of enthusiasm as our students got stuck in and embraced all things Tongan and the opportunity to learn something new.

We wrapped up the week with a special closing ceremony, to celebrate all the hard work and participation throughout the week. And to top it all off, Room 1 took out first prize for their song performance video! Yay! Go us!

A massive thank you to all of our students, staff and whānau who helped make Tongan Language Week such a memorable one. It was awesome to see our WPS community come together to celebrate and show their support for the Tongan culture.

Mālō ‘aupito to everyone who played a part in making the week such a success!

Today room 27 learnt to use the EE App to draw their story of Mount Talau in our Tongan Language Week.

Today our Year 2 tamariki used the pen tool in the “E E” App to create their pikitia of Mt Talau for Te Uike o lea faka Tonga.

Malo e lelei and Happy Tongan Language week!

Today we, celebrated Tongan Language Week by learning about a traditional story from Tonga and exploring some amazing digital art skills!

With support, we learned how to make a copy of a picture of Mt Talau and use the polyline tool to carefully draw around the mountain. We then got creative by drawing our own trees and filling our shapes with our chosen colours. We even learned how to use solid and gradient fills to make our artwork stand out!

We had lots of fun experimenting with the different Google tool and watching our pictures come to life.

Check out our pictures to see our cool progress!

MALO AUPITO!

Mālō e lelei,

For Tongan language week we looked at the story of Mt Talau.

In the EE app we drew a mountain using the pen tool, we used the bucket to colour it in.

We did the same for the ocean and the sky, some of us even did trees, clouds and a sun.

Some of us found it easy but some of us had a few challenges.

Thank you for reading.

What of our creations below.

After a mornings work in the māra, Room 11 put their maths skills to the challenge by searching for shapes in nature. It is incredible what you can find when you look closely enough. We found loads of circles and squares but we also found triangles, diamonds, hexagons, cylinders and a rhombus! It is amazing to see classroom skills being transferred into a real life situation.

We finished our māra time by harvesting some fruit and vegetables, this is always an exciting thing to do and everyone wants to do all of the things.

We used this produce to make a delicious salad in the afternoon block, most of us found this delicious and ate lots of it. There were a lot of comments about how healthy it was. All of the students enjoyed shaking the jar of ingredients to make our honey and citrus dressing.

It is always a full on day in te akomanga o te taiao so you may have some tired children this evening.

Room 10 were the lucky first class to harvest from our avocado tree, unfortunately they didn’t get to eat them as they need to ripen.

We also harvested lettuce, radish, lemons and oranges. We used these ingredients as well as eggs and honey to make a salad with honey and citrus dressing.

We washed and chopped the lettuce and radish, we boiled the eggs, we mixed the citrus and honey and mixed in all together in our bowl.

Most of us really liked our salad and ate it all!

‘I think the salad was yummy.’

‘The salad was healthy.’

‘I liked the honey with the salad.’

‘The salad was yummy and healthy and good.’

‘The salad is delicious!’

‘The salad was healthy and yummy.’

Lots of us ran to Whaea Saane to show her our delicious salad.

Room 10 also worked really hard in the māra caring for our animals and helping Mātua Jim and Whaea Deirdre with some jobs.

Our day was awesome, good, incredible, amazing and fun!!

Kia orana e te kōpū tangata,

What a busy couple of weeks we’ve had! We’ve proudly represented Kūki ‘Āirani during our WPS Commonwealth Games and have been celebrating Cook Islands Language Week too!

Whaea Kathryn has been super busy as part of the Kūki ‘Āirani team, but she managed to film a behind the scenes of one of our CIM intercom announcers, Sinai – you can watch the video here. Sinai’s māmā also visited with lots of little siblings, and they sang My God Loves Me in te reo Māori Kūki ‘Āirani for us. They did so well! In return, Miah and her big sister Ella performed an ‘ura for our visitors and shared their parents’ beautiful tīvaevae. We’re all looking forward to seeing the Fruean sisters perform again at our closing assembly tomorrow along with our Senior Pasifika girls Sinai, Lolini, and Alayah.

We’ve also created a short video retelling David Riley’s Ki Mua! Ki Mua!, which shares the legend of how Aitutaki got its name. Be sure to check it out here!

It’s certainly been a full-on two weeks, and we’ve loved every minute of celebrating the language, culture, and country!

Room 10 has been exploring geometry, shapes, and symmetry as part of our mathematics learning, while also connecting to Weymouth Primary School’s Orators theme for this year. During our small-group discussions, students have been demonstrating excellent speaking and listening skills by following our talk rules, listening respectfully to others, taking turns, and confidently sharing their mathematical thinking. It has been wonderful to see students explaining their ideas, asking thoughtful questions, and working collaboratively as they deepen their understanding of geometry through rich mathematical conversations.

We started our day by heading to the māra to feed and care for our animals. After that we planted some turnip seeds in a garden bed, we also planted celery and baby kale.

Some people took rosemary sprigs and stripped the leaves off and put it in with the chicken hay. We did this to help keep the mites away, mites are like fleas for chickens.

Some people also got to harvest oranges for our orange cake.

After morning tea we made orange cake, the ingredients were:

sugar, baking powder, flour, oil, eggs, and oranges.

We all got to have a turn at blending the oranges with a stick blender.

After the cake had been in the oven for 45 minutes we got to taste it.

This is what we thought of how it tasted

interesting

spoongy

orange pie

orangey

delicious

bad

sweet

pretty good

yummy

sugary

disgusting

not bad

good

sour

Frida said ‘I think we could make this on the weekend, it’s pretty easy’ and most of us agreed!!

The day began with animal feeding and some houses that needed a bit of a clean up.

There were so many things like ‘this is so cool!’, ‘I love this’, ‘the garden is so fun’ said throughout the morning. It is so nice to hear these things when tamariki are doing jobs like digging compost and turning over garden beds. It is all part of a sustainable lifestyle.

It wasn’t all hard mahi though, just before returning to the classroom we harvested some oranges and tangelos.

After morning tea we used this fruit to bake a cake, the cake used the whole fruit with no waste. Reading a recipe was good for our literacy and our numeracy skills, we had to work out things like 1 and 3 quarters and 2 thirds of a cup. We also had to read what the next ingredient was that needed to be added.

Half of the class loved the cake but half thought it was a little bit bitter. Whaea Deirdre thinks we might have needed to cook it for a little bit longer. There’s a lot of learning in the baking process, one comment that I heard that made me laugh was ‘all of that hard work baking and I didn’t even like it!’

We were proud to celebrate Tumeke Tumuaki Day by showing our appreciation for our wonderful principal, Whaea Saane, and all that she does for our school community. During the special Papa Team assembly organised in her honour, we presented Whaea Saane with a card signed by every student in Room 10, filled with heartfelt messages of thanks and appreciation. It was a lovely opportunity to recognise her kindness, leadership, and the care she shows every day. We hope our messages brought a smile to her face and reminded her how much she is valued by all of us at Weymouth Primary School.

Room 10 proudly represented Malaysia in our WPS Commonwealth Games. We were excited for the day and gathered for the opening ceremony, dressed in our house colours and ready to compete. Unfortunately, heavy rain led to the morning events being cancelled. Although we were disappointed, we didn’t let the weather spoil our day. Instead, we watched New Zealand’s proud Commonwealth medal moments and enjoyed a range of fun indoor games together. In the afternoon, the weather cleared enough for us to try fencing using pool noodles and take part in gymnastics in the hall. Even though our day didn’t go exactly as planned, we learnt an important lesson about resilience—staying positive, adapting to change, and making the most of every opportunity!

We welcomed 2 new chickens to school so Room 4 had the job of making sure their new home was nice and clean for them. We changed the hay, gave them some delicious food and made sure they had fresh water.

The pigs needed the same treatment as their house was a bit of a mess, luckily room 4 has some very hard workers who got the job done.

It was Tumeke Tumuaki day, a day to celebrate our amazing principal so we decided to spoil her with produce from the māra. We harvested and gathered eggs, honey, lettuce, silverbeat, rhubarb and avocados. When we delivered them with our class picture Whaea Saane was very happy and decided she might need to cook dinner for her family.

Room 4 loved spending time in the māra today and probably would have spent the whole day there if they didn’t have to finish early.

We started our day by going to the māra to feed our pigs and chickens.

Next we went hunting for small bits of concrete and wood to put in the bottom of the tyres. The tyres are going to be made into garden beds inside the chicken coop.

Before we left the garden we harvested oranges/tangelos for our cake.

Back in the classroom we learned to make a bridge with our hand so that we don’t cut our fingers while cutting the fruit. We each cut our fruit into quarters , we were allowed to eat half of them and put half of them in the pot for the cake.

Whaea Deirdre then put our oranges on to boil. Once they were soft we used a blender to mix it up. As we took turns blending we added sugar, almond flour, baking powder and eggs.

Once it was all mixed up we put it in the oven to cook.

After lunch it was all done so we got to eat it!

“Our cake was tasting so yum!’ – Revathi

“Cake smelled good” – Hazel

‘The cake was too minty so I am going to give it to my family.” – Presheeka

“We can share cake with our friends” – Raheeb

“The cake was too sweet so I want to give it to my family’ – Emma