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It’s hard to believe we are coming up to halfway through the school year already.

It’s been a very busy time at Waianiwa School with lots of learning, creativity, sport and fun.

Our Year 7&8 students were lucky enough to have a 5 day camp at Deep Cove alongside the Year 7&8 students from Drummond School.

They took part in a range of different activities and experiences, such as hiking, waterfalls, kiwi spotting, a Doubtful Sound cruise, games, pest trapping and a highlight for most… fishing.

Keep reading to find out some of the amazing activities, memories and highlights they experienced at camp. 

The day of camp has finally arrived!

Room 3 were feeling a mixture of emotions, such as, excited, nervous, happy and curious about what our school camp was going to involve. 

We fished a lot, someone even caught an extraordinary shark.

We saw lots of weka and other cool animals, and learnt lots about the various trees and plants.

We did marine biology and some groups even caught plankton!

We did tests on the water to figure out the levels of fresh and salt water in the water, and we even got to taste the water at different levels - instant regrets!

We also looked at traps and even set some off.

Some had dead animals in them.

Yuck!

Our adventures continued into the evening, we trekked out to see some bright glowing glow worms, which glowed like stars in trees, and did you know that glow worms are actually maggots?

We also got the experience of hearing kiwi calls, we went kiwi spotting and some of us even got to see our first kiwi with our own eyes!

Another highlight was the Doubtful Sound Cruise.

We travelled to the Tasman Sea and we saw some seals that were having their beauty sleep.

We had a very nice view of the Doubtful Sound, which amazed all of us.

We even had an impressive Guns N’ Roses impression from Ella while on deck!

We also went on walks, the first to Helena Falls.

It was very tiring and when we finally made it to the top of the walk we went swimming under the waterfall which was super cold.

We walked back down feeling refreshed, but still very tired at the same time.

Our next big hike was the Hanging Valley Waterfall.

It was by far the longest walk we did all week!

It was very steep, as if we were walking up on a cliff, and it took us a whole 7 hours to venture to the top and back.

When we arrived at the top of our Hanging Valley climb, we all decided we had earnt a swim in the refreshing water.

We used the waterfall as a slip and slide, it was sooo much fun and believe it or not, the water was actually rather warm! 

On our way back to school, we stopped at a cafe near the Key and got a hot chocolate with a strawberry chocolate fish, some ate it and others dumped it in their scrumptious hot chocolate.

We had such a wonderful time at camp and memories that we will keep forever!

We have continued our Healthy Active Learning focus across the school this year and enjoy having Richie Crean come and work with the students as well as the teachers on incorporating more movement within our learning, even getting movement into our literacy and numeracy learning.

It makes our learning fun, engaging, inclusive and gets us active, contributing to keeping ourselves healthy. 

We were lucky enough to win this crazy catch net which is great fun to use in the playground. 

Our PALs have been continuing to work closely with Richie and provide excellent learning opportunities for their peers and our younger students through a games based approach where they focus on fun, engagement and the values and competencies we can grow through our PALs games.

Our PALs are very passionate about their role and it is great to see their leadership skills shining through.

They are currently looking at our school vege garden and tunnel house and planning the planting of this in the Spring, with the hope that it will become ‘Wai and Kai’, a garden to table type initiative within the school. 

With Active Southland’s ideas and support, we changed our athletics training this year to have more of a focus on the individual skills that the different events require and broke these down into fun and engaging rotations as we trained for our athletics day with Drummond and Heddon Bush Schools. 

This training helped Vinz, Alexis, Logan and Waipuna win their age groups and take the gold medals as age group champions in their respective groups.

Well done!

We’ve had our annual Reap swimming also and all students benefited from a fortnight of lessons focused on water confidence, swimming and life saving skills.

This is such an amazing programme and provides such valuable skills and learning for all our tamariki.

And carrying on with our active focus while we had such great weather over the summer, we loved sharing our day with Glen and Tomo from Cycling Southland as we learned about how to ensure our bikes are safe and rideable as we spent the day riding and gaining all important cycle safety skills.

They even helped some of our juniors learn to ride without their training wheels.

Such great learning and growth has been displayed in the first two terms of this year in and out of the classroom at Waianiwa School, we can’t wait to see what the next two terms hold for our students, school and community!

Waianiwa School proudly supported by Fiordland Escapes