All Kahu and Tui students have been using their hand sewing skills to make a pencil case.

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Great learning this term in Kiwi

As winter approached and the crisp air settled over our school, we came together to honour Matariki, the Māori New Year. This special time marks the rising of the Matariki star cluster, heralding a season of reflection, renewal, and hope.

Our community joined with us as we embraced this celebration of Māori culture, a moment to reflect on the year past, set intentions for the future, and foster a sense of community and togetherness.

Our Matariki festival is wonderful blend of learning, sharing, and cultural appreciation. We had a superb night celebrating this wonderful occasion! 🌌✨

Here are some of the images and videos from the students sharing and our great art show.

Rocket Launch

Our visitors from Greenmeadows Intermediate

Some highlights from term 1

Today I am excited to share my recent experience of meeting the people from Rocket Lab. It was an incredible opportunity for Kahu children to learn about space. Kāhu had the chance to learn about how long it takes a Rocket to get to space.

We were told it takes about 8 to 10 minutes to get to space from Earth. The next question was which type of petrol do they use for the rocket ships? They informed us that they use Liquid Hydrogen in rockets. Rocket lab people also told us where they sent the rockets, it was in Mahia close to Gisborne or in Cape Reinga up North.

The best part was they even told us what the next plan in the future for Rocket Lab was to send a rocket to Mars. In the end, all of the Kahu students had a chance to ask questions about space. Overall, it was an unforgettable time, and I feel grateful to have had the chance to meet such nice people from Rocket Lab.

We need your moth pods!  The competition to collect as many moth pods as we can, has started!  There is a $5000 prize for the school or early childhood centre which can collect as many pods as they can.

This highly evasive plant is everywhere – strangling our trees, natives and plants and can even smother fences and buildings.  Once you start looking for it, you will see it everywhere.

Pick the pods and bring to school in bags to help us win.  You will be doing us and the environment a huge favour.  It’s best to wear gloves when handling the pods as they do have a sap inside which can sting your skin.

If you need bags, we have heaps at the office.

During our Enviro sessions this week, we experienced what it is like to be a scientist and it was FUN!  We used our observation skills, touch, and investigative skills to experience a variety of activities.

We began by being blindfolded and touching an object inside a box – trying to figure out what it was.  There was a huge toy weta, a prickly glove, a pot scrubber and even a moth pod!

We then played with some scientific “toys” which illustrated the three main physics principles at work: conservation of energy, conservation of momentum and friction.  The “toys” were Newton’s cradle, the splink, the rattleback and Jacob’s ladder.

Another activity we did was to use our observation skills to sort and categorise through a collection of random debris.  We used magnifying glasses and tweezers to put the debris into groups and then recorded our findings on a graph.  New Zealand has the highest amount of plastic eaten by birds in the world – not something to be proud of!  Two good things have happened recently which are helping to fix this problem – no longer can you get plastic straws and also milk bottles no longer have the plastic rims around them when opened.  The next step is to stop having stickers on fruit as these often end up in the environment  .

This term in kāhu we have been extending our knowledge by learning and making our own digital art.

In the kāhu hapori we love expressing ourselves, our identity, hobbies, skills and many many more! The purpose of digital art is to teach not only students but also teachers different digital skills on multiple platforms and apps. With this digital art, it helped us get creative and show off some of our very creative skills when it comes to technology. Here are some forms of digital art we have made in kāhu this term.

In the Kāhu space, the first digital art project we worked on was flox art. Before creating the flox art we looked at examples of flox art from a popular flox artist Hayley King and even some examples from our younger year 3 students. Flox art was a way to express different and bright colours through patterns of birds and plants. After we had some inspiration we went on to Canva to start our digital flox art. During this fun digital art project we learnt how to use Canva and how to use cool tools on Canva like transparency.

Pearl

The second digital art project we worked on in the Kāhu space was titled ‘All about me’. This project was based on the keynote app. The final masterpiece was a silhouette of the side of the person’s face filled with shapes of things that were a big part of their life, or something that they valued. To complete the art we were given many shapes to experiment with. We even learnt how to edit shapes and our silhouette to match our personal selves. We learnt many more tools on the keynote to help express our values through the keynote.

Pearl

The third digital art was called pop art. The first step to our pop art was learning about what it was. We first got to see some amazing pop art that people around the world had created. After that we learned a bit  and started creating pop art. We used the camera to take a photo of ourselves posing. Next we edited our photo to filter our photo into black and white. Then we could finally go into markup and pour all our creativity into creating a funky background and colour our clothes. While creating our Pop art we learnt how to take photos on camera, how to edit and add filters to our photos and how to draw using Markup on photos.

Tayler

The digital art journey has helped us by helping us develop our technology skills and by teaching more digital tools we can use later on when doing other digital art projects. The digital art projects were also fun opportunities for us students to express our creativity in a way we are engaged, entertained and excited

Pearl, Georgia & Eric

We are learning to code our sphero.  Today we learned to control the sphero when making a square. We also pimped the sphero with flashing lights and sounds.

We are now building a bridge to program our sphero to cross without falling into the river below.

The Tech Enrichment Club, a group of Year 5-8 students, used Minetest to create a virtual model of our school. There was a lot of logical and mathematical thinking involved when collaborating to make decisions about scale and measurements. They did a great job and had a lot of fun in the process!