Tēna koutou e te whānau,

Wow, what an amazing evening I had on Tuesday night watching Arataki School perform at the Tauranga School’s choir festival. Our children made our school proud. We had soloist items, school items and whole choir items. The theme for the Choir festival this year was Walt Disney, it was great sitting in the auditorium singing along to the songs from popular movies that we know. I would like to acknowledge the following children - Cartier McGreal, opening the festival with Karanga, Ruan Vorster, Zoey Dick & Ellie Bodman who performed solo vocals and Renee Naera who did a solo ballet dance, as well as all children of the choir who dedicated so much of their time to attend practices in their lunchtimes. A big thank you to Rachal Spencer and Fran Mortell for coaching our choir children, and to our Friends of School parents for their sponsorship of our costumes, assisting with practices and organising the children during the evening.

Other activities that our tamariki have been involved in this week include:

A group of children who represented Arataki School at the Western BOP chess tournament
Our Year 5 & 6 hockey team played in the WBOP schools Hockey tournament on Thursday.

Whanau Hui - Wednesday 4th September - 5:30pm

On Wednesday we are hosting a whanau hui for any whānau who are interested in enrolling their tamariki in Level 1 Te Reo Māori rumaki class. Currently, Kopukairoa has 5 reorua (bilingual) classrooms. Next year, we are looking to move to having one immersion class as part of Kopukairoa. The class will begin at Year 0-2, and the curriculum taught will be Te Marautanga o Aotearoa. If you are interested in enrolling your tamariki into full immersion education please come along to our hui on Wednesday night. We look forward to seeing you there.

Whole School Hangi

On Friday 13th September, we are having our first ever whole school hangi. Our Hangi will be part of our school wide celebrations of Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori which officially begins on 14th September. The Hangi will be free for all children, however, we will be asking for donations of kai and for whānau to help with our Hangi preparation. A separate notice will be sent home with more information.

Have an amazing weekend with your whānau.

Ngā mihi nui

Vicki Hiini

Tumuaki

Arataki School Choir Are Under the Sea

Article added: Friday 30 August 2024

Steam Education

As a part of our STEAM Inquiry this term (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics) our Hopukiore team have had the awesome 'STEAM Ed' guys coming into school and working with us for two afternoons. In our classes we worked in pairs using amazing VEX Go robot gear. We had to problem solve, and complete different designs and challenges with the gear like building free standing towers. In the second session we all got to build a moving vehicle and do some simple programming to drive it. Check out the photos to see how cool this learning was. Thanks STEAM-Ed!

ATK on the Football Fields

Arataki students Tiare Talbot-Chinula, Tahlia Stewart and Keira Andrew have been playing for the Tauranga City AFC Under 9 Blues team this season. It's the first season the girls have played football and they've enjoyed learning new skills and making new friends. Last Sunday they took part in the annual Waipuna 10th Grade Tournament where they showed great sporting spirit. Teams came from as far away as Taupō and Hamilton. That's them at the tournament in the photo. They still have a couple more games to look forward to before the end of the season.