Year 7 News

By Lisa Dixon | Posted: Monday March 25, 2024
As the end of the first term approaches we reflect on how far our Year 7 students have come over their first nine weeks at Balmacewen and how busy we have been!

All 9 classes had really successful camps to Waihola CYC. The weather was fantastic for most, challenging for others but all have had the experience of sleeping in tents, plenty of outdoor challenge opportunities, team building and making new friends.

The Year 7 students certainly displayed the Balmac school value of perseverance when they tackled the 12km Taieri River track. Other activities included using portable camp cookers, an epic Zip line through the bush, archery and rifle shooting, loads of team building challenges, water sliding for some, kayaking, bubble soccer and Archery Tag. All classes had exceptional parent/whanau help and we cannot thank you enough for giving up your time to help out at these camps. Check out some of our camp writing in this newsletter.

After our initial beginning of the year getting to know our students and heading off to our Year 7 camp at Waihola, classes have turned their focus into our term one integrated theme which includes our literacy focus of moment in time writing and readings to tie in with our New Zealand Histories focus through articles, journals and podcasts. Alongside this we have been planning and working on their projects  for our Ūkaipō exhibition. The date for this will be on Wednesday April 10th from 3pm to 7pm in the school Hall  for our community and whanau to visit. 

We continue our work on the Balmac way with a focus on our school core concepts and values. In class, students have completed a number of activities to reinforce these ideas reinforcing "this is how we do it here".

Thank you again to all of our parents and caregivers who continue to support our class programmes and activities.

Lisa Dixon

On behalf of the Year 7 Team. 

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