The amount I have grown from this year through till last year has been such a lovely journey with all my fellow classmates.

I have been surrounded with such lovely and caring friends helping me in every aspect. they have made me a more self aware, confident and a more responsible person I am today, thanks to them I can now feel more comfortable in the space I learn in then I used to be. even answering a simple question I used to be to shy to even put up my hand and say what I thought was the answer, but now I can put up my hand without feeling like everyone will laugh and make fun of me, but now I only think at least I tried, at least I have tried to share my answer and not feel like that.

I am so proud of myself for becoming more and more like I can do anything I put my mind to just like everyone should.

This term we’re learning sticks and String games in class.

The first string game we learned was the cup and saucer. That one was quite easy for the first thing that we learned. I have played with strings before at my old school but my teacher didn’t explain it well. I didn’t really enjoy doing it. But I was really happy when I got my 19th try, and yes I was counting. I was probably the last one to get it but luckily my teacher that I have this year, Whaea Sarah, explained it quite well to the whole class and I actually got it on my second go which was exciting.

The second game that we played was the stick games and me and Jess were partners for this one. We listened to these two people tap their sticks together to the song Tutira Mai nga Iwi. There was lots of laughter coming from our corner of the class. When we got to one of the last parts of the song you had to throw the sticks to your buddy and me and Jess weren’t the best at this part, we were both too scared to throw the sticks to each other so we mostly just held them in our hand or just slowly handed them over to each other which was fine with me and her. The end result was fine we learnt how to pass to each other PROPERLY and now we are literally pros at using and playing with the sticks which i’m really happy about😄.

I hope we get to play with these items again. And i hope me and Jess are partners again🥰🩷.

  Today is the the production and i’m feeling a little bit nervous because my whole family is coming to watch. But other than that i’m pretty excited. It’s the first production i’ve ever been in. Our purakau is all based around glow worms. In the waitetoki river there used to be glow worms these little creatures glow like stars in the river banks. They used to come out at night, but not in the winter, because it was all cold. They used to live in peace just sitting on the banks and glowing at night, but the pakeha made a culvert, and now you don’t see them any more.

Our production is all based on the purakau around the area that we live in. We are all going to be dressed up as glow worms.  Our T-shirt is teal coloured and it’s all baggy so that we can tuck it into our tutu. And to match the teal T-shirt we have a teal cap. You got the choice to wear tutu’s but most of the boys didn’t want to but all the girls did. We all have to wear either black pants under out tutu or black shorts. And of course we all get our face painted. And to make us look even more like glow worms we have little lights tied on to our baggy T-shirt.

I can’t wait to get on stage and perform in front of my family.

I think we all could have done a bit better to be honest,  there wasn’t enough energy in the room to make us do better then what we did today. But other than that i think we did really well but atleast we’ve got the evening show to look forward to and i think we will do a lot better this evening, atleast we get another shot at it. But overall i really enjoyed it.

This week in class i learnt how to spell my name with my hands in sign language.I also learnt how to do the alphabet in sign language. I love how the people who can’t hear and talk can use their special language to comunicate to other people who know sign language and they can expess how their feeling with their hands and body language. I think its very cool.

In Ngaio class we did a Manaiakalani task which was an all about me poster. I found doing this very fun and I learned how to use google draw better than I did last time I used it.

This year in Ngaio and kauri class we are doing a reading challenge. You have to pick out books and if you’ve read enough pages then your allowed to get prizes such as: drawing for the afternoon, getting an ice block, a pizza, mufti for a day, mufti for a week etc. The books i’ve read so far are the hunger games, catching fire, Mockingjay, twilight and the book that i’m reading now is called new moon which is part of the of  the twilight saga. My favourite book that i’ve read so far is twilight. Hopefully i’ll have read enough pages to buy a pizza.

If i ’d never learned to time travel none of this would have happened. I woke up feeling dizzy and sore, I reached up to pull my hair off my forehead but as I swept it off my face I felt wet, sticky blood dripping from out of my forehead. I wiped it off on my grubby T – shirt that was stained with mud, some grass and now a few drops of blood. As I tried to get up I felt a sudden rush of dizziness run through my body so I lay back down again and think “ I wonder where I am? I just want to go back home”. A few hours passed by with me still lying down on my bed. I opened up my eyes to find a small window on the left of the room, so I stood up still feeling wary and sore but I kept walking until I reached the window. The window was a bit too high up for me so I had to stand on my tippy toes to reach it. I could only see a little bit of the window I was hoping to see the city that I lived in but I was wrong very, very wrong.

On Tuesday Gina came to school. We all ran and walked to the hall excited for what game we were going to play. We gathered up on the blue mat in the hall as soon as Gina explained what we were going to play(which was ripper) we were all hoping that our friends were going to be on the same team as us, and soon enough they were.In my team there was Scarlett,Amaya,Tristam,Cattleya,Maliya,Gene and me. I really liked my team.Gina said that we were going to start from one minute and then move up to two minutes and that was when we started the game.As soon as Gina blew the whistle we were off running to pull off tags from the other teams I pulled off two and I’m not sure how many the others pulled off but at the end we got seven tags once we gathered all of them up.the second round got moved up a minute which means this was our last round.Gina blew the whistle and we were off pulling tags again once timer stopped  we all had to go back to our base and count up our tags we got ten the green group got eleven the purple team got eight and the yellow team got nine which means our team came second and the green team came first. Then we headed back to class and got back to doing math.

Challenges :I thought the walk was challenging due to the heat and my non – positive attitude, I also thought kayaking  was quite difficult because I couldn’t seem to hold the paddle right, falling to sleep was probably the hardest because jess kept taking away all the blanket and everyone was to chatty.

I am grateful for all the parent that could help us out at camp, iam also grateful the people that got to go to camp ( including me) and I am most grateful for all the teacher who got out of their way to organize camp for all of us.Thank you!

  By Madeleine.