Last Post For 2015

With four hours to go in the 2015 school year, we are almost done!  Best wishes to our Year 8 students who are heading off into the big wide world.  Year 7's - see you next year!

Special Visitor

Today we had a special visit by Aaron Smith!  The rugby players and rugby fans in our class got to meet him, and ask him questions about his life as an All Black.  We felt very lucky to have this experience - thanks Aaron!

Flippaball - WINNERS!

Congratulations to Halcombe Black who won the local flippaball competition.  Well done team!

Year 8 Lunch

In keeping with tradition, the Year 8 students enjoyed a wonderful end-of-year lunch at Essence Cafe today.  Thank you very much to the PTA for sponsoring this event.  Yum yum!

Water Slide

We had a lot of fun on the water slide we made at school on Friday!

Rangitikei River Trip

We'd been looking forward to our camp fire challenge for ages!  We ran out of time to do it during our week in Turangi, so off to the Rangitikei River we went!  The track down to the river was a bit squishy and we had to get out and push the cars a couple of times, but we soon found a good spot and got started on making our camp fires.  It was pretty hard, because the wind kept blowing out our matches.  We figured it out in the end, and the marshmellows tasted pretty good!  We also had time to dip our feet in the water and have a wee look around.  What a great afternoon!  Thank you so much to our parent helpers; Mr Smith, Mrs Pene, Mrs Gilmour, Mrs Langtry and Mrs Mudgway.

Slip n Slide Rounders

We've been waiting to play this game for months, and today we gave it a whirl!  #lotsoffun.  #superslippery.

 

Athletics Sports

Today we held our athletics sports, and it was AWESOME!  First we rotated around 10 different fun and challenging activities - everything from the water relays to three legged races to long jump to target throwing to obstacle courses.  After that we had the sprint races, the 400m and the house relays.  Congratulations to everyone for trying your best and supporting others.  Well done to Emma and Isaac, who both won the 100m (for the athletics championship), followed by the 400m - an excellent effort!

Here are some action shots from the obstacle course:

Each house marched along the track, while performing their house chant:

Interhouse Tug Of War Competition

This afternoon we had an epic interhouse tug of war competition.  All the houses faced each other, earning points along the way.  Then the two houses who had the most points faced each other in the final.  It was hard work and our muscles were very tired at the end.  Well done to Matai who won the Junior competition and Totara, who won the Senior competition.  

The Great Potato Project

The time had finally come to dig up our potatoes!  We worked with the students in Room 7 and 8 to plant these last term and they have been growing like mad since then!  We were amazed at how many potatoes we had, and some of them were huge.  Some people won prizes (sponsored by Bunnings) for:

• heaviest - DeQuante and Carter (98g)
• weirdest shape - Cody and Tristan
• most potatoes - Jade and Olivia (25)
• spot prize - Logan and Jett

The best part about growing these potatoes was that we got to eat them for lunch!  Delicious!

Buddy Class - Water Bomb Elimination Game!

Athletics Champs Update

New Discus Record!
A massive congratulations to Catherine for setting a new school record for girls discus today!  She smashed the old record of 18.70m set in 2009 with a throw of 20.60m - an awesome effort!

High Jump Action
We had a huge audience for the high jump competition this afternoon.  It was very exciting, as the bar slowly rose higher and higher and several people jumped higher than they ever have before!  Isaac won the boys competition with a jump of 1.30m.  Jade and Greer tied for first place in the girls competition, with both successfully jumping 1.18m.  Well done everyone!

Check out these awesome action shots taken by Madi:

Athletics Champs

Good luck and best wishes to those students who will be competing in our athletics champs this year.  They will compete in five events; high jump, long jump, shot put, discus and 100m.

If you're feeling nervous about high jump, so long as you don't do it like the lady in the video below, you'll be fine!

New Library Furniture

The Student Council has donated two fancy seats to our school library.  They used money from fundraising activities from throughout the year.  They look awesome!  Thanks Student Council!

Symmetrical Patterns

In maths, we've been working on designing our own symmetrical patterns - completely from scratch!  The only thing we were given was dotted paper, and it has been really interesting to see the massive variety of designs and colours that have been used.  Awesome!

Sketch-A-Highlight

One of our camp follow up activities was to sketch one of favourite moments from camp.  Sketching can be really tricky, but everyone did a wonderful job.  Here are some cool examples:

Athletics - Sprints

Things got serious during our sprint training on Friday!

Camp Word Clouds

We had to choose one of our favourite camp activities, and write a list of 20 words associated with that activity.  Next, we used the ABC-YA app to create our word clouds.  Here are the clouds created by Catherine, Danielle and Shane:

Camp Comic Life

One of the activities we've done this week, was to create a display of our favourite camp photos using Comic Life.  Check out these cool examples by Logan, Daniel and Mya:

Athletics - High Jump

There were many different styles of the scissor jump in high jump today!

Athletics - Discus

What a fabulous afternoon to practice our discus skills!  

Athletics - Long Jump

Today it was time to improve our long jump skills!

Athletics - Shot Put

Here are some photos of us in action during our shot put session today:

Athletics

We are about to start athletics, our final PE focus for the year.  We'll be learning about and practicing shot put, discus, long jump, high jump and sprints.  Check out the current Halcombe School records - perhaps one or two might be broken this year?

Turangi Camp

Wow!  What a week we have had!  There were so many highlights, and we all had an amazingly awesome time.  During our week in Turangi we went mountain biking, caving, white water rafting, tramping, swimming and much more!  A massive congratulations to the students in Room 6 who faced their fears, made the most of being able to experience these activities and had loads of laughs along the way.  Thank you so much to all those who contributed to making our camp something special - especially our awesome camp parents; Mr Alcock, Mr Henderson, Mr Gilmour, Mr Poulsen, Mr Madden, Mrs Chapman and Mrs Langtry.

We would also like to acknowledge the support of our PTA, who helped make our camp possible.

You'll be able to find out a lot more about our camp experiences as we complete heaps of follow up activities over the next couple of weeks!

Flippaball - Halcombe vs Halcombe

It was all out war when Halcombe Black faced Halcombe White in flippaball on Friday!  After a very physical game, where lots of awesome goals were scored, the Black team came out on top.  Well done!

Totally Vets Photo Competition

Earlier in the year, some students entered a photo into the Totally Vets Photo Competition.  The winning photos are put together to make a special calendar each year.  Well done to Sophie who made it to the Top 13, out of more than 140 entries!

10 Photo Challenge

We had heaps of fun completing the 10 Photo Challenge this afternoon.  Using the ipads, we had to take photos of all sorts of things, before using Pic Collage to display our photos in a funky way!

• an animal
• something funny
• a group selfie
• a jumping OR handstand pic with at least two people
• something yellow
• #awesome
• an extreme close up of a flower
• an action shot of one of your group members doing a sporting activity
• one group member giving another group member a shoulder/piggy back ride
• a photo of your choice :)

Flippaball

We have two teams entered in the the local flippaball competition, which started tonight.  Our White team had a bye, while the Black team faced FIS 1.  Our team raced out to an early lead, then FIS fought back.  Lucky we were able to hold on, and eventually won 11-5.  Great start team!

Club 100

Congratulations to Ffion and Shane - our Club 100 champions for 2015!

Tech Challenge - Marble Rolling Competition

Today we worked in teams to try to build a ramp that would send a marble shooting off across the floor!  The team who could make their marble roll the furthest would win.  We were able to use newspaper, straws, sellotape and cardboard to make our ramps.  Well done to Grace, Bradley and Jade who managed to make their marble roll about one metre further than everyone else!