What a great way to end Term 3

The last week of term was packed with a lot of presentations, competitions and celebrations.
On Wednesday Rod Ritchie gave up some of his holiday time to come and work with R10 and 11. Rod, Jamie's dad, is here on holiday and he was only too happy to come and wrap up our narrative unit and inspire our budding author's to write one last piece.  The prizes are some of his books from the Warriors series. We will return to those stories after the holidays and polish them for the competition.

On Thursday a team of four students: Stella, Zak, Tait and Cailin, represented us at the annual Motec BP Technology Challenge and came away with first prize - and a fantastic microscope!  Well done team.

Friday was the best day.  We had non stop performances, presentations and shows as we savoured the different flavours of the Popcorn Programme. Creativity and imagination were to the fore as we watched puppet shows, learnt about building useful things out of recycled wood and other building materials, imagined the new garden boxes overflowing with fruit and vegetables, oohed and aahed over the biographical paintings, listened to the environmental messages brought to us by the video group, watched the creativity groups interpretation of metamorphosis and marvelled at the artistic designs of the wearable arts garments.

Check out the short video clip below for images of our great week. (Unfortunately I don't have photos from the Technology Challenge yet.)

Mathix Maddness

On Thursday the 16 of August, eight maths maniacs took part in a Mathix competition at Mot High.

The challenge was to answer all of the maths questions correctly. To make it even tougher, the rules were that teams  were not allowed to get the next question until they had got the previous one right.

There were two teams: Team A was made up of Seth, Mac, Daniel and Cameron and Team B, made up of Catherine, Kate, Jake and Peter.

The hall was buzzing with mathematicians talking through the problems and trying to get the answers first. It was not a very exciting spectator sport as the audience only had a spreadsheet, which was very hard to read, showing how many questions each team had answered correctly.

The two teams worked very hard and in the end the A team came 5th and the B team came 15th. A pretty good effort. Great team work guys!

Emily

Down The Slope

On the 12th of September, Cameron Jones went to the AMI inter-school Primary Races.

Cameron was superb! Getting 4th place against people who go to the ski field 24/7 is an amazing achievement! With a time of 36.35 seconds, only a couple of seconds behind the leading racer.

Well done Cameron!

Inter-Regionals, Here We Come

Room 11 is really succeeding at the moment, especially in sport.
Jake and Mac have made it through a long and tiring process to get to the inter-regional Cross Country event to be held in Wellington.

They had to come in the top 5 for Mapua School's Cross Country.  Mac came 1st and Jake came 2nd. They then went to the inter-schools, where Jake came 1st, Mac came 2nd, Ben P came 3rd, and Zak R came 4th. Mapua really cleaned up in that race!

Next was the Regional finals, which had all of the schools around the Tasman region competing to get into the Tasman Cross Country Team. The top 10 runners were the chosen ones.  Jake came 3rd, and Mac came 4th. So they are going to Wellington on the 26th of September, and racing on the very next day.


Good luck boys!