Year 7 News

We have started this term well with our new exciting PBL project focus on the Living World for science. Our term topic is called "Discovery. Our driving question for this unit is " How can we, as concept designers, think like scientists to investigate and design the alien creatures discovered on Planet X so that they are believable and realistic characters?

This unit will involve the students earning their "Science Degree" in biology by learning about classification, adaptations and food webs. They will be participating in a range of activities to ignite and excite about the animal kingdom. This also included a visit to Otago Museum's animal attic to work with the educators on classification and adaptations. This was a very valuable session to create interest and build knowledge for our students. 

Once the students have completed their "degree" they will be working in teams to create and design realistic animals that could exist on Planet X- a smaller planet than earth, shorter days, cold, frozen tundra areas with frozen poles.  We are very lucky to have onboard Animation Research Limited ARL based in Dunedin who are our "clients" that our students are designing for.  They have visited us to ignite the unit and will return over the next week to give feedback and check in before the  best of our designs will be shared with them for feedback!

For our Balmac way this term we are focusing on the Balmac super skills covering Growth Mindset and Collaborative learning so far and looking at what it means and looks like to be organised and ready to learn. It is great to see students taking on board the work we are doing in this area and applying these core concepts to our classrooms and playground. 

This term we are also learning our school Haka and school Pepeha. This also focuses on the the local stories to support these the meaning of our Pepeha.  Later this term we are having a school Haka competition where each house group will compete for house points.

Thank you to all parents and whanau who continue to support our class trips and activities.

Lisa Dixon