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

What an awesome time we had at our school Matariki Market!  Room 1’s stall was selling raffle tickets, freshly popped popcorn, lolly jars, delicious baked cookies and MORE! The atmosphere was full of smiles, and laughter!  All of the money we raised will go straight back into our classroom. We’ll have a discussion and brainstorm ideas together to decide what we’d like to spend our money on.

A huge thank you to everyone who came along, supported our stall and helped make the day such a success. We appreciate you all!

Ngā mihi nui

Room 1 have been working so hard on their phonics and spelling this term!
We are so proud of the effort and progress they are showing.

Look at our superstars!

Through phonics, our tamariki are learning how letters and sounds work together to help them read and spell new words. These skills are helping them become confident readers and writers.

Today Room 12 did the very important job of analysing the two science experiments the Maunga Team have been doing this term.

The first was compost in a jar. We were surprised to see that the contents of our jar had changed significantly over 6 weeks. Have a look at one of the photos to read the amazing observations the students made. We concluded that the compost in a jar was very successful and something easy enough to do at home.

We also wrote up the findings from the buried rubbish experiment. We found that the fork, cardboard, paper towel and lunch packaging had completely or mostly decomposed. The fruit cup and lid had not changed at all. The orange was the biggest tsuprise as it had ripened but nothing had started to eat it.

It has been incredible learning to watch these experiments over term 2.

Tēnā koutou

This week we became movie makers!

We learned how to use Google Vids to create our own digital movies. We added texts, pictures, voiceovers, and background music to make our videos interesting and engaging. Our movies were all about ourselves, helping us share who we are in a creative way.

We developed our digital skills by learning how to plan, create, edit, and present information using different digital tools. We also practised speaking clearly, being creative, and using technology responsibly.

This was a fun way to learn new skills and express our ideas!

Check out my short movie about me! Enjoy!

Ngā mihi

Mrs Rubena

The Papa Team have been learning about habitats this term, this was very apparent when I spoke to Room 6 this morning. The students were able to explain what a habitat is, identify what it provides for a living thing and name some types of habitats.

We explored the idea further in our māra by searching for and observing micro-habitats. There were shouts of excitement as students uncovered centipedes, slugs, worms, snails and even spiders hiding cleverly in our garden. We talked about how important it is to leave these living creatures safely in their habitat and to put the item back that they had lifted to find it.

If we leave these creatures uncovered they may be found by a predator.

We also talked about the ways we as humans can help these creatures by providing habitats like bug hotels and lizard lounges.  We had a look at the ones around our māra and restocked them so that they are safe and inviting for insects and skinks.

We finished the day planting and weeding.

It was a fun day of solidifying Room 6’s learning.

Not only did Room 22 get to explore compost and its changing states of matter in the māra but they also had their Tread Lightly Caravan session this afternoon.

They got to visit stations teaching them about sorting rubbish and why it’s important, what should and shouldn’t go down our drains, how much energy it takes to run different electric items, our carbon footprint and the importance of some of our very small garden creatures. The activities were a lot of fun, not surprisingly the VR headsets were the most popular.

Without all of the parent help we got this would not have been possible so thank you so much to them.

The students wrote a letter each to the Lorax which was a lot of fun and something I think I will do again.

I hope that some of this learning was shared at home as we were reminded that our learning and knowledge is far more powerful when it is shared.

As you can probably tell, we’ve been busy preparing reports to go home this week, hence the late entry for Week 8! There are still a few reports to be handed out on Monday for those who weren’t at school to receive them today. I am looking forward to meeting Whanau at our Student Led Conferences on Thursday next week. I know your tamariki are really excited to show you all the hard work they’ve been doing in the school garden.

The Matariki disco was definitely a highlight of Week 9. It was so good to see everyone enjoying themselves with such huge smiles on their faces. We checked on our recycled paper that we were working on last week. It’s nice and dry and resembles the cardboard that egg cartons are made from. We’re very proud of our efforts!

Last week, Tama went home with Azyla, and this week, he has gone home with Bob for the weekend. Well done to both of you for demonstrating our school values!

Kia ora whānau,

SWEET 16 is currently working on their speeches based on Roots, Voice and Future. They had to come up with a main idea and integrate all 3 main points. Yes, they did use AI as a tool, why not? I’ll be assessing them on their delivery seeing as Orators is our year theme.

Check out one of SWEET 16’s speeches by Selanau.

Whaea J