Junky Monkeys 2025

Hi Everyone,

Today (Tuesday 18 March), Room 11, Room 5 and Room 8 enjoyed our first block with Junky Monkeys. This organisation utilises good junk and takes it to schools, encouraging students to play with it.

This allowed students to bring out their creativity and use their imagination. It was great to see so many engaged students. We watched a student video yesterday so we know what to expect from todays session. We also learnt of the 5 Junky Monkey rules:

  1. Have Fun
  2. Listen to yourself
  3. Respect Each Other
  4. Respect the Environment
  5. Respect the Equipment.

Here’s our photos 🙂

Welcome to 2025!

Hi Everyone,

It’s been a while but we are finally here with our first blog post for 2025. It’s a new year, a lot of new faces and new teachers have joined Team Tui. We have gone back to having 3 classes this year – so it’s a huge team of Year 7 & 8 students.

Our focus for this term is KO WAI AU? So we have been learning a lot about ourselves and sharing this information with our class. We are beginning to look at the journey some of our families took to arrive in Aotearoa. Exploring push and pull factors and understanding the sacrifices that were taken.

So, be on the look out. We will regularly post our learning with you all from now onwards.

MALO

Never Give Up

This film is about having a positive attitude towards any challenges you may face. Whether in the classroom or in a sport – the message here is to “Never give up”.

Let’s see how a tag group welcomes a new team member into the squad. At first the new member is shy and reluctant to join in, but members of the team encourages her to give it a go. She proves herself that she is just as good as the team and it boosts her confidence.

Everyone can do anything if they put their mind to it and persevere 🙂

Enjoy!

Settlement of Aotearoa – Maori Language Week

Part of our Maori Language Week learning this week also involves us looking at a bit of history. Some students were curious about Maori arrival into Aotearoa, where they came from and how long it took before British settlers appeared.

Team Tui teachers decided to created some content about that so we can do some learning about it. We watched a video called “He Whenua Rangatira – A Maori Land”. During the video, we’d stop and discuss some things ie. What is Iwi migration? Trade routes? Who are British explorers? etc

After watching the video, students had to create a timeline to highlight the main events from the video. The timeline below was created by one of our Y8 students.

Students got a better understanding of what Maori arrival referred to and how the arrival of British settlers impacted the way Aotearoa was and shaped it to the Aotearoa we live in today.

Harakeke Weaving – Maori Language Week Learning

It’s Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori (W9) and Team Tui have some fun things lined up for our learning this week. We set up a padlet for the learners to have a say in what they’d like to do this week and one of them was Harakeke weaving.

We had some of our learners walk down with the teachers after midday to our local community park (Crossfields) to cut some flax. We followed protocol and ensured we did our Karakia before proceeding.

Check out some of the photos from the Team Tui students who started on their Harakeke weaving.

HALs for Team Tui

We’re in week 8 and for our HALs session this week, we’re learning how to play ‘Four Circle Balls’. The focus of Four Circle Ball can be several things. It is a game that helps develop strategic play, as well as encouraging tactical hitting and moving of the hoop. At the same time, it is also a game that teaches children to work collaboratively in order to referee themselves and play fairly.

The students had a great time and decided this will be our game for this week before we move on to our next ‘Move well’ game called ‘Michael’s vs Magic’s – 6.8 from the Challenge games’.

Tongan Language Week – 6.9.24

For this years Tongan Language Week, we had a group of students perform the Milolua and a tau’olunga for us. Some of our Tongan Mothers came together to teach the Milolua over a period of 2 weeks, while Mrs Fonua and Mrs Tupou-Fonua taught the tau’olunga.

Our Tongan mothers also helped us role play a traditional Tongan Taumafa Kava (Tongan Kava Ceremony). We learnt about the origins of Kava, the myth about it and the protocols we follow.

Overall, it was great to see a school hall filled with the wider community, ex-students included – all for a good cause and for new learning about the Tongan culture.

Events/Outcomes – Probability Learning for Team Tui

Team Tui have been learning about Statistics and Probability for our Strand Maths. We are just wrapping up so we can move on to Measurement but today’s lesson was for us to learn about converting our collected data into graphs using Google Sheets. A simple lesson helped us see through numbers, to visuals and also formulate an equation to help us better understand the data collected.

Above is an image of what we covered for the lesson – data – 2 types of graphs – an image of what we collected and the equation.

Malo,

Team Tui

Cook Island Language Week challenge!

Week 3 is Cook Island Language Week and our lunch lady – Whaea Nikki set a challenge for the schools for LCS. The Question behind the challenge is “How can we stay connected with our Olympic Country (Room 11 is the Netherlands) to the Cook Island?

Basically we have to find something that we could use to compare between the 2 countries. For example: Food – what is the national dish for the Cook Islands and national dish for the Netherlands. How is it the same? How does it differ?

Room11 brainstormed some ideas and our leaders worked in pairs to create their presentation. This will be shared in assembly this Friday.