St Josephs Enviro Team

The St Josephs Enviro Team is made up of 10 children from Year 5 upwards. Penny, Emily, Jonathon, Josh, Laura, Jordyn , Ben, Samantha, Briarne and Aleisha make up the team of children responsible for environmental issues around the school like rubbish and food waste.

Our school gardens are looking wonderful thanks to the gardening experience of our caretaker Mr Robinson and the willing helpers in our “Green fingers” group. “Green fingers” is made up of one child from each class in the school. “Green fingers” are responsible for helping to keep our vegetable gardens in top shape!

Jump Jam

This year some of the Year 4 students, Sophie, Bree, Kate and Liv,

 have been leading Jump Jam for the school. We attended a Jump Jam leadership course in Timaru last term at Gleniti school. We learnt a variety of different songs like Mamma Mia, Dancing Queen and Happy Feet. When we were finished we were puffed and out of breath. We, then started learning signals, body language and visual cues. 

 Then we had to bring our talents back to school. At school we teach then lead the school with the routines of our Jump Jam. This is twice a week – when the weather is fine!

Student council

This year the Student council have been involved in running and organising events like the school disco, and the upcoming wacky day and family group day. The student council has also been in charge of fundraisers like 10 cent Friday, the Samoan tsunami, the Australian bush fires and caritas. We usually have a meeting every month to discuss all the happenings in the school, after every meeting we go back to our classes and report back on all the things we have talked about at that meeting.

Year 7 and 8 Camp.

This year our Year 7 and 8 students both went on camp to Wainui in Term 4 but at different times. We all enjoyed the camps and the adventurous activities, including high ropes, kayaking, archery, orienteering and OLS (outdoor living skills). We were split into two different groups A and B but we all did the same activities but just at different times.

The weather was different for each of the camps. The Year 8’s had  had rain hail and sleet showers but however that meant MUD SLIDES!!! While the Year 7’s had perfect weather.

We were all very happy with the way things went and we hope the years to come will be just as good!

Big Day Out

On Friday all the Year six’s travelled up to Christchurch for the Big Day Out which is an annual event. We travelled in a bus to Adrenaline forest. After we had a safety check everyone sprinted to the start. The course was huge with cables strung between trees for us to climb on. The start was easy but it just kept getting higher and higher. Not many of us had been there before so we thought it was fun and scary at the same time. Everyone was about to leave when they realised 5 of us were still up in the trees. We couldn’t get down so someone climbed up and lowered us down in our harnesses.

The second part of the day was spent at Bottle Lake Forest. We were split into two groups and made bivouacs .Everyone searched for huhu grubs and some people even ate them.

After that we travelled back to school, met their parents and told  them about our Big Day Out .

These are some of the activities the students have been involved in over the past terms.

 Young Leaders Day 2009

Recently four of our Year 7 students attended a National Young Leaders Day in Christchurch, at the Town Hall. There were many different speakers The students learnt a lot from this day like: take every opportunity as it comes along, never give up when times are hard , give everything 100% and keep moving forward.

Kids Congress 2009

 Two students from Year 7 and 8 recently attended a 2 day ICT convention in Christchurch called the “Kids Congress. The two students that attended the course were taught how to create an interactive computer game. With this new knowledge, these students will create a virtual tour of our school for our website.

Family Groups
The whole school is divided into Family Groups.  Each Year 8 pupil is a Family Group Leader.  The groups are made up of children from Year 1-Year 8.

The groups meet regularly for a variety of activities. We have just had a Family Group Quiz which was a lot of fun and very challenging!

Challenge Groups

At our school we have something called “Challenge Groups” where our senior children participate in activities to extend their knowledge. We have had Maths, English, Computer/Digital photography, Short Story writing and Science groups.

In the Maths challenge group we learnt about statistical investigations and numeracy. In the Science challenge group we learnt about making science experiments and creating a display board for our own science experiments.

In the Computer/digital photography we are going to learn about making websites.

Spelling  Bee

Two of weeks ago 3 teams from St Joseph’s went to Timaru to compete in the Otago Daily Times Spelling Bee. We all had a lot of fun. The Yr 7/8  teams came 9^th and 19^th, and the Yr 5/6 team came 4th. We think they did really well.

Term Two and Three Activities