Welcome to the start of Term 4

 Kia Ora All,

I hope everyone has had a fun and relaxing holiday and you are all ready to hit it hard for one more term. In true Motupipi fashion it'll be a packed term with plenty going on to see the school year out. Here's a quick list of things that'll put you on the front foot.

• As always, homework books and book bags to school daily please. I highly recommend helping your child learn their weekly spelling list as part of your home learning.
• New Maths Buddy Tasks have been set and will be available on Monday morning. I've tried a slightly different system and set quite a lot of tasks for the children to work through. They will have time in class almost daily, but Maths Buddy is also a great way of doing some maths with your child at home.
• The homework Teacher Task for this term is going to be times tables. I'll be sending home Yoda Tables, which we also do at school. Yoda Tables are an excellent way of practicing times tables and a great home learning activity.
• Reading daily is critical! I highly recommend a regular trip to the town library with your child to make sure they have books to read before bed. Doris at the library is an excellent person to talk to if your child doesn't have a current series they're into. We do weekly trips to the school library too. Daily reading is very important both for your child's reading ability and for developing their love of reading. 
• We're planning to do a smaller school production at school this year. The date isn't set yet, but it will be in the second half of the term in Week 7. It'll look a bit different to previous years, but it'll be every bit as entertaining. 
• There are a bunch of other events coming up so keep and eye on the newsletter to be in the loop.

In the last week of last term, Oakie's grandparents offered to perform some fiddle music and teach the children an Irish dance. Below is quick video of the session. As you can see, the students loved every minute of it!

Last term, as part of the Digital Technology curriculum, we made some videos. The students used an ipad to video, airdrop to transfer the files and they also used some functions on imovie to edit their videos. Enjoy learning all about fractions!

Another part of our Digital Technology learning has involved learning some basic coding using Scratch. You may remember the Binary Digits lessons we did via Zoom during lockdown. This is all related to a part of the curriculum called Computational Thinking. Below are some little projects the students have done. Even though the projects are quite simple, there were a lot of steps involved in their creation including learning how to copy and past an embed code and use gmail to email it to me. Click on the green flag to start each project.

I'm thoroughly looking forward to the oncoming term.

Rock On,

Mr M