No images? Click here 9 December 2021Pinehurst School NewsletterOpening Words from the Executive Principal...Kia ora tatou, good afternoon, 你好, 안녕하세요 We have been celebrating students’ achievements in a pavilion, watching the wind and sun contend for domination all week. And the rain has stayed away! It has been wonderful, actually: six smaller Prizegivings, enabling us to celebrate all of our students in person, streaming to parents online. It hasn’t been quite what we would normally have planned to do, but it has worked well, and – as with everything we have done these past two years – we have learned from it! I’m hopeful we will be able to run our traditional prizegivings next year, but we now know that we can stream live, with great sound and decent pictures, successfully, so this will be a feature that can become part of our normal lives. Congratulations to all the prizewinners this week: they’ve done brilliantly. If a student hasn’t won a prize this year, though, please help them not to become dispirited! They may well win one next year, but prizes are only part of the story. It’s important to take pride in all of our achievements, and to remember that prizes are the icing on the cake. Very tasty icing, of course, but very much a topping. I also can’t begin to express just how wonderful I found it to see so many students in school this week, especially those who have been at home and who made it in for an hour or so for the ceremonies. So well done to everyone, and I can’t wait to see what you will do next year. It has been an interesting, challenging school year in many ways, and I’m not going to repeat the words I’ve used in Prizegivings and in the Yearbook – which will be winging its way to you in the next couple of weeks. Instead, I just want to thank everyone. Over the last two years, we’ve all learned a little bit about ourselves and a little bit about other people too. We’ve discovered, at Pinehurst, that we have the ability and will to come together brilliantly as a community; and we’ve also discovered, I think, that we have a greater ability to act selflessly and consider others ahead of ourselves than we may have suspected. I’m thinking about Auckland and New Zealand as a whole here, actually, as well as about our school. We can all debate the decisions that we have made as a society, and that our Government has made for us: there have been calls that I think have been right, and calls that have seemed unwise or uncertain (or late) – I guess that’s the nature of decision-making in a crisis. But I’m very hopeful that we will emerge the other side, take a deep breath, and see with fresh eyes that the people of our diverse, open country are a pretty good bunch. So thank you to everyone – staff, students, parents, whanau – for the support and trust you have shown us these past two years. And here’s to a more settled 2022! The school office will be open until December 23rd, and will then reopen on January 5th. When we reopen, we will be at either red, orange or green traffic lights, and we will send home full details about what this means for Pinehurst. Many of us will be working from school during the holidays, of course, so feel free to contact me. Teachers return on January 26th, and students return on Tuesday 1st February. Have a good break, enjoy the promise of a warm summer and, if you’re travelling, travel safely, ready to come back to us next year. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all. Alex Reed 如需阅读校长的中文留言和重要事件日期,请点击此处 Dates for your DiaryTuesday 1st February 2022
Please see end of the newsletter for Uniform shop opening hours. Kia ora, The end of the year has come around so quickly and I can’t believe it is the last day of school for 2021. This has been a week of celebrations and recognising the amazing achievements of our children. Our three prizegivings were a testament to the high levels of engagement and perseverance, along with resilience and determination and all of those wonderful skills we want to develop in our children. Every child has made progress this year and every child has in some way done the best that they can do. Watching children celebrate their graduation from the Primary in Year 6 it is wonderful to reflect on how far they have come in the years they have been with us. Some have made exceptional academic progress such as our Dux, Tiger Nui, and others have been exceptional in their ability to demonstrate kindness, empathy, citizenship and resilience. All skills are valued and help each individual to be a better human. As we have some Christmas fun today and celebrate with musical items and Christmas jokes we are very grateful for the wonderful year of learning we have had. Thank you once again for all of the support you have given us, we really appreciate it. Wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year, we can’t wait to see you in 2022! Ngā mihi, Sian Coxon, Principal of Primary Primary PrizegivingsOur Primary Prizegivings can be found on our YouTube channel as unlisted videos at the following links: P5 Global Perspectives – Learning about jobs and what people do.This term we have been researching ‘The World of Work’ and what it means to have a job. We have looked at who works and why they work. We have learnt about a range of jobs and what they are. Also, we looked at different ways to sort jobs. For the last two weeks we have been interviewing adults around our school to discover what they do and what they like and dislike about their roles. Emily asked Kirsty what she had to do each day for her job. She was surprised at all the different things Kirsty does. Amelia asked Kirsty what she liked most about her job and was happy that Kirsty particularly enjoyed working with the children. We also enjoyed hearing about Kirsty’s pets and that she has a rabbit that thinks it is a cat! Grace asked Dawn if she worked in her office all day or if she went outside for some fresh air. She was happy to hear that Dawn does lots of things around the school both inside and out. Carlo asked Terry if he had to sometimes work from home. He discovered that Terry’s job is mainly at school. We were very interested also, to hear about Terry’s dog who was the naughtiest dog in the world because she once stole fish and chips from the neighbours! For our Literacy we have been learning about fairy tales. For our Big Write Adventure, we have been writing directions for Little Red Riding Hood to the Wolf’s den. It seems the traditional story was in fact incorrect! It was just a big misunderstanding and the wolf is not a baddie after all! Little Red Riding Hood needs to find her way to the wolf’s den to give him some cupcakes and an apology letter for thinking badly of him all this time. We used bossy verbs and positional language when we wrote our directions. In Science we have been learning about plants. We have been studying plants in different habitats and learning about the parts of the plant and their function. The fabulous P12 and P13!Our online learners from P12 and P13 have worked incredibly hard this term. Let’s hope that 2022 brings us all back to the classroom. Here is our message for you all. In P17, we discovered that Santa will be stuck in MIQ and there may be no Christmas toys for the children in Auckland! Our city needed our help, so we put our design thinking hats on to become toy engineers. Toy engineers get to apply their math and science skills to the fun of making toys that work well and are also entertaining, inexpensive and durable. We discussed how engineers would be required to go through a process of drafting, research and redesigning before being able to construct the final product. The students were introduced to an online 3D modelling program called Tinkercad and learned the features of this programme. After the research and design phase, we used Tinkercad as a platform for creating 3D models of our toy designs. Very exciting! Here are some examples of our creations!
Primary SpanishWhile most of the learning took place online this term, I could not be any prouder with our primary students for their fantastic engagement and hard work over the lockdown period. Our Term 3 and 4 intake New Entrants learnt about colours and animals – always a popular topic with the young ones! The Year 1 students learnt to identify their family members in Spanish along with the correct definite article for each noun – “el” for masculine members and “la” for feminine members. The Year 3 students have also learnt to talk about their family this term but in full sentences; they can introduce their family members’ names and ages using third person sentence structures. It is great to see them use their existing knowledge of Spanish to extend their sentences and they have done a fabulous job with their speeches this term. The Year 5 students worked very hard on the topic of telling the time in Spanish. This unit had strong cross-curricular links with Maths and the students can now ask for the time and read all time combinations from digital and analogue clocks. Our activities may have been behind the screens but that did not stop us from singing, dancing, and playing interactive games and quizzes. Señora Cataloni would like to congratulate all her students for their hard efforts this term and wishes everyone a “Feliz Navidad y un próspero año nuevo”. Primary MandarinFor the past two weeks we have been preparing for 圣诞节 Christmas, last week we practiced our handwriting for our Christmas messages, making sure we follow the stroke order rules when we are writing the characters. This week we made cards for our 爸爸 and 妈妈. We also made an interesting discovery - in Chinese we always say “Dad and Mum“ whereas in English we say “Mum and Dad”. The Year 5 at school students went down memory lane and had a singalong to a song we learnt in Year 3. Service to School AwardsThe Year 6 students of 2021 were involved in a range of leadership positions and fulfilled their roles with enthusiasm, demonstrating commitment to providing service to the school. We would like to acknowledge the level of responsibility and role modelling they provided. Years 3-5 CouncillorsYear 5 and Year 6 Sport Awards 2021Kia ora, I hope that parents enjoyed tuning into our Prizegiving’s yesterday. I feel that they went really well and there are some things that we had to do out of necessity that will become the new normal for us as we move forward into next year. It was fantastic that so many students were able to join us and be acknowledged in front of their peers and the wider audience online. There is a fair amount of festive cheer around the college today with antlers and tinsel being sported. Students are enjoying regular classes this morning before a shift to more festive activities after lunch within their bubble. For most students, next year will start as normal with our full timetable getting underway on the first day back. Students will have access to their timetables when SchoolBox is updated in late January. For our new students in Years 7 and 9 their school year will start with a transition activity on Friday 28th January. This will be an opportunity for students to experience the new structures that they will be working within and meet all of the new students before classes begin the following week. More details about this will be included in a letter later today. To our graduating students and their parents, thank you for everything that you have contributed to the school over the years. I wish everyone a merry festive season and a safe and happy summer. Nga mihi, Kieran Verryt, Principal of College College PrizegivingsOur College Prizegivings can be found on our YouTube channel as unlisted videos at the following links: Year 7 & 8 Academic Prizegiving Year 7 MandarinFor the past three weeks of the term, we have been learning about the 4 great inventions of ancient China: Papermaking, Printing, Gunpowder, and Compass. Both on-line and in-school classes worked in groups, with each group in charge of researching one of the inventions and presenting to the class to share our findings. We then looked more closely at Printing and discovered that engraved block printing was invented in the Tang dynasty (618 AD – 907 AD) to produce Buddhist scriptures. It was not until 1041-1048 AD when Bì Shēng (毕升) invented the movable-type printing that printing became popular. We also learned that the word “printing” in Chinses – 印刷 (yìnshuā) literally means “impress” (印yìn) and “brush” (刷shuā) which depicts the process of printing. To have a hands-on experience of how printing was done back in the old days, we replicated the concept of the movable-type printing by using carved potatoes. We did a quick revision on what the Mandarin as Foreign Language students have learned in the Food and Drinks topic this year and chose “high-frequency” characters for us to create phrases and sentences with. Each of us claimed a character that is different from the rest of the class and carved the reversed character on the potato. We then worked together and printed words and phrases using our carved potatoes. Some of the students working on-line used a variety of materials they could find at home. One even improvised by using soy source to print as he did not have any paint or ink at home. We were very creative in making all sorts of dishes and food related phrases using the same set of characters we created. It was so much fun that we are thinking about giving this another go next year when all the students are returned to school. Maths in Year 9In our Year 9 bubble we finished off our Trigonometry unit by making clinometers and using them to measure the height of the trees. In our online class, we started this week by doing Christmas challenges which included solving equations to uncover a picture of the Grinch. Year 10 MathsOur Year 10 students have been working on their statistical investigations over the last two weeks. We went to the turf to collect some data – measuring the height, standing long jump distance in cm, number of shots out of 10 for basketball, number of times of throwing and catching a frisbee and time taken for the sprint in seconds. They worked as groups of 2 or 3 and chose the numerical variable and groups to make comparison. Students used the statistical enquiry cycle which is called PPDAC to conduct their own investigation. They drew the box and whisker plots using their own data set, then described the features and wrote a conclusion summarising their findings. Year 9 photography competition winnersFern by Alexander Lindsey Human (Hugo) by Zoe Atkinson The following photographs are the winning entries for the Year 9 Science photography competition as judged by Mr Verryt. Congratulations to all winners! Tui and Kowhai by Roger Lin Arum Lily by Tara Sabor College SpanishToday in Spanish class we learnt about how Christmas is celebrated in Spanish speaking countries. We learnt about the special day that is celebrated on the 6th of January called El día de los Reyes Magos. On this day, children get to open gifts from the three wise men. In Mexico they also celebrate Christmas with a piñata which has religious meaning behind it. In class we played the traditional piñata song in Spanish and had turns trying to break the piñata. It was a lot of fun watching the kids try to break it. ¡Feliz Navidad! Year 10 SpanishYear 10 Spanish students learnt all about the tradition of eating 12 grapes at midnight on New Years Eve and other end of year festivities. Then they gave it a go! Eating one grape for every ring of the “campana” at midnight while watching a video showing people coming together in the plaza Puerta del Sol in Madrid Spain to take part in this annual tradition. Each grape represents a wish, so for every grape you eat, one of your wishes comes true! Social ScienceYear 7 Social Science have been learning about ancient humans and to end the year we did our own cave drawings on crumpled paper bags. Thank you so much to Ms Heslop for lending us the pastels and to all the staff who gave us bags! DoE Silver QualifierThis year our tramp for the Silver Qualifier started at school where we met and loaded into vans to set off on our trip. Firstly, we arrived at Mahurangi Regional Park where we unloaded our gear, checked the tents had everything and then walked with our packs and tents along the rocky coast where we had to watch every step. We put up our tents and left the campsite to walk along the beach where we came upon dry quicksand, which some people had a wonderful time running around in. We walked back around the Mita Bay loop track passing a sign with the quote “clear skies and clouded thoughts” when we got back to the campsite some of us played ‘catch’ and ate dinner. At 6:30 pm we all gathered around and talked about our route for tomorrow and how long it would take us. The next morning Ms Toerien loved waking us all up at 6 am with a loud ‘good morning’. Once we got ready, slathered on sunblock, and ate breakfast we walked to the vans for a 30 minute trip to the start of the Dome Valley track and a part of the Te Araroa track (a track from the top of the North Island to the bottom of the South Island) which Mr Johansen ran through which seemed impossible to all of us. After 6 hard hours we made it to the end, where we were picked up and driven to Matakana to get takeaways for an early dinner. That night some of us played spotlight in the dark which reminded me of being 10 years old, but it was fun! The next morning was the final day and Ms Toerien was very nice as she let us have an extra 30 minutes of sleep. This time we had more to do since we needed to pack all our bags and take our tents down so we could get ready to head home. We needed to complete the tramp with enough distance, so we ended our tramp with the ‘perimeter track’ at Wenderholm and a beautiful walk on the beach at Shakespear. Overall, the camp was a lot of fun as we had the chance to get to know each other better as well as experience a few nights outdoors. I know many of us cannot wait to complete the next tramp! Year 7 and Year 8 Sport Awards 20212021 Year 9-13 Sport - Main Award WinnersCongratulations to our main sport award finalists and winners for 2021 I Spy... P4 - Friday Fun Day... "Everything Christmas Reindeer" I Spy... P1's terrific Christmas Trees! I Spy... Year 4 students enjoying a bit of reading in the fresh air... Our Christmas TeddiesThis week some of the teddies from our Christmas window display were donated to the More FM Big Christmas Toy Bounty, helping families having a tough time this year. We followed them on the start of the journey to their new homes! Christmas Raffle BearsThe winners of our Santa and Missy Bears from this years Christmas display are: Winner of Missy Bear - Katlynn Pan (P4) Winner of Santa Bear - Taylan Nyawo (P13)
30th Anniversary Formal DinnerOur 30th Anniversary Dinner has been rescheduled to the 12th February 2022. For those of you who have already booked tickets, these have been carried over to the new date. To amend any bookings or for any further information please email michelle.alves@pinehurst.school.nz Uniform Shop - Holiday Opening Hours 2022:Week 1 Tuesday 18th - Friday 21st January (9.30am - 12.30pm & 1.30pm - 3.00pm) Week 2 Tuesday 25th - Friday 28th January (9.30am - 12.30pm & 1.30pm -3.00pm) Please note - Covid QR code/masks and vaccination passport required to enter shop. There is a limit of 10 people at any one time. Urgent requests outside of opening hours please email vicky.kenny@pinehurst.school.nz |