Totara News - Term 2 Week 7

Kia ora koutou!

The Peace Game has begun! What an amazing opportunity for students to be working together, meeting new people and attempting to solve some of the worlds current issues. Well done everyone, it has been wonderful to see you all bring your skills to the game and be challenged at the same time.

Well done everyone in your use of our new Google Apps system - one of the advantages of these tools is that both Kerry and Rob can ‘see’ what you are up to each week as you learn to use the various tools within it. Please remember to keep everything you wish to share with the class and us inside your individual folder - that way we can give each other feedback and help if needed. We encourage students to log in to show their families how this system works!

Helena sharing her photography blog...

In celebration last week Helena shared her amazing photography blog - here is a photo of her leading the school through this and showcasing her great skills! Well done Helena. Well done also Reuben who is currently leading our school celebrations!

In English and Social Studies this week, we are going to look at where you are all at with your assignments and make sure everyone has the right amount of time and resources to enable them to complete the assignment in a meaningful way. We will do this on Tuesday morning first thing, straight after we have another look at the kids news site that we explored last week. Here is the link if you’d like to explore the site further:

http://www.kiwikidsnews.co.nz

Learning to read an asTTle assessment - to identify next steps...

This week we will introduce you to a tool called Mathletics, which will be used to supplement our maths programme and target the skills you each need to practice. 

Your asTTle maths assessments will be used to personalise the Mathletics activities you do, once you’ve had time to learn and play with the various tools within it of course!

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Totara Newsletter - Term 2 - Week 6

Kia ora koutou!

Firstly we want to warmly welcome Meg to the team. Meg joins us from Miro! We also welcome Nathan from Miro - Nathan is joining us on Thursdays. It's great having you both with us!

Last week’s debate was a great success. Thank you and well done to everyone involved. We will be spending some time on Wednesday to re-watch the debate and analyse how it went. This week is also Peace Game week! We are all really excited to be involved. The sessions will run for three weeks 9:30am - 12:30pm Monday and Thursday. If you have any questions or comments about the Peace Game please let us know and/or refer to this link: www.worldpeacegame.org

In maths this week we are moving from investigating triangles and getting more into angles and properties of other polygons. Students are making some rather complicated 3D polygons as a fun activity - these will be on display as they get finished.

The school recently implemented a new system called Google Apps for Education. This includes an email address for every student in Totara (we are starting with the secondary first), plus an online area for storing and collaborating on documents. You can email your child on his/her address which is in the format: annac@sevenoaks.school.nz. We’d love you to ask your child to show you what they’ve done so far as this will reinforce their learning. This is linked to the Totara Ultranet site, but can also be accessed from any web browser by typing in one of: docs.sevenoaks.school.nz, mail.sevenoaks.school.nz, calendar.sevenoaks.school.nz.

A couple of expectations we have for use of this system include:

1. Parents are able to log in to the student email, documents and other areas of it at any time. Students may change their password as long as their parent(s) and educators are informed what this is.
2. Any aspect of the system - emails, chat, Google Plus, documents can be monitored at any time. We do however work in a high trust environment where we expect all online work/communication to be appropriate to learning and respectful at all times.
3. As more of our work and learning moves online, we will be exploring various cyber citizenship issues such as plagiarism, safety, managing our online identity/digital footprint, passwords and sharing information and so on.

If you have any questions please email us.

Nga mihi,

Kerry, Rob and Ella

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