Congratulations Lily

Congratulations to Lily who was a finalist in the Puffin Short Story Awards Competition this year. There were over 1500 entries so be to be finalists is a great achievement. Lily got some helpful feedback from Dawn McMillan who is a writer and the author of the book "Why do Dogs Sniff Bottoms?".
You can read Lily's story with the feedback on our terrific writers blog.

Daffodil Day

Our school had a gold coin donation day for Daffodil Day. The Room 6 students drew a great chalk picture on the concrete and we lay our coins on it. Thanks to all the people who participated.

Our author visit

This week we were very lucky to have a visit from Feana Tu'akoi. She has written heaps of stories for the school journals as well as fiction and non fiction books. We have some of her books in our library. She told us how she became a published author. Many of her stories are based on personal events and she told us some funny stories about things that had happened to her that she later used for a story. We enjoyed listening to her and asking her questions.

Wetlands

Our "Future Focus" topic this term is our wetlands. We are planning a trip to Tomarata Lake to look at our local wetland area so we can see how healthy it is and what we can do to keep it healthy. Mrs Lomas has been teaching us some graphic art skills that we have used to create posters.

Speeches

This term we have spent a lot of time writing speeches and preparing for presenting them. Our topics were "My greatest achievement", "I am an expert at.." or if we preferred we could choose our own topic. Everyone in Room 5 wrote and presented a speech. We spent a lot of time practising so we were able to present our speech confidently. The class participated in judging our class presentations using the success criteria we developed. Nine students from the class then presented them to the school and were judged by our judging panel. Congratulations to Rafe and Joseph who have been selected to represent Tomarata School in the Year 5/6 division. Lily is our runner up and will go as an observer unless she is needed to fill in for our other finalists. Good luck.

The Dental Nurse...

Last week the dental van came to school to give us all check ups Dan Dan Dan some people were lucky to come out unharmed others were not so lucky. No just kidding. The dental nurse was very nice. Good thing it was only a check up. But some had to get fillings. Prescriptions were given out too. On the prescription there are three marks Green which means you are not due back for 18 months orange means your not due back for 12 months and red meant you need to go every six months. Some people didn't go though because they had different dentist I was one of those people. The dental van is gone now though so no need to be afraid. Just kidding!.
By Rafe.