School news

Poetry Cafe - Wednesday 26th June

The Year 7 students of Otamatea High School have been learning about poetry and writing their own poems and are holding a poetry café where they will share and recite their poems. 
This will be held in A block at Otamatea High School. Parents and caregivers are invited to this event, however, for catering purposes we require whanau to RSVP. 

Year 7 parents have been sent an invitation via email and encouraged to please RSVP by 19th June to sarah.bland@otamatea.school.nz 

Producers and Consumers Event - Year 8  product showcase

Parents caregivers and whanau are invited to the school hall 12pm on Wednesday 3rd July to view the Year 8 students' product showcase. Students have been learning about the rights and responsibilities of consumers and producers, as well as advertising language, and product development. Here are some photos from last years' event. This is a wonderful event for students to showcase their ideas and creativity! 

Year 9's Explore Gadgets and Inventions

Some of the Year 9 classes have been getting some hands-on insights into different gadgets and how they work, and then discussing how they might have had deeper impacts. Debating the impact of a hacky sack or a set of hair straighteners seemed simple at first, but they were challenged to consider the social implications of a game that requires only a small prop and any number of players; or the reasons we take pride in our appearance to the extent of labouring over our set of hair straighteners. Other gadgets, such as the ancient Roman lamp or the antique sextant, provided students with a more immediate challenge to first identify what they even were. The Gadgets and Inventions topic has been a wonderful opportunity for our students to explore technology over time and discuss the wider implications of human ingenuity, and it has been great to see them engaging in discussions about this topic in their classes.

Author's Visit

On Monday, students from our creative writing club, The Nook, and others were lucky to attend a writing workshop hosted at school by Sherryl Clark. Sherryl has published 80 books and ran a workshop that was focused on writing flash fiction. Flash fiction is what it sounds like; short fictional stories that are usually between 300 and 500 words. Sherryl guided the students through several writing exercises that aimed to build the students’ writing skills for beginnings, middles and endings, with the goal of creating a first draft. Students are encouraged to polish up these drafts and enter them in our Otamatea Flash Fiction competition. 

We are very grateful to Sherryl for coming in and running this two-hour workshop with our students.

NCEA Anxiety

In Level 2 Health Oshana and Nieve are creating actions to limit the anxiety for our senior students doing NCEA. 

International Languages Week

This week we celebrated the International Languages Week here at Otamatea, and throughout New Zealand. This annual event promotes language and culture from around the world, and it has been a great opportunity to embrace our culturally diverse community at OHS. 

Students and teachers who speak foreign languages participated in a school video.
International Languages Week video 2024

Students competed trying to greet in as many different languages as possible. The team challenge was to come up with a list of eleven international greetings.

Hospitality level 3, Food technology years 7, 9, and 10 cooked spring rolls, nachos, pizzas, and apple turnovers to share during intervals. As a language learning instance, students had to say ‘thank you’ in Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and French to enjoy the international kai.

 Mrs. Groenewald visited the library and read in Afrikaans for us.

Girls Infrastructure Trip

A group of senior girls travelled to Whangarei this week for the annual "Girls in Infrastructure", an event aimed at creating awareness and sparking interest in the career opportunities for girls in an industry that has typically been male dominated (currently women only represent 14% of the construction industry in New Zealand). The day was filled with lots of interactive activities from various businesses and education providers in the industry. The girls got to speak first hand with women currently working in the industry, as well as having a turn on a digger, climbing into some of the heavy machinery used and shifting a power pole with Northpower's hiab. They also had two site visits, one to the new Okara Marina that is currently under construction, and another to the Whangarei Wastewater Treatment Plant (which was really interesting once you got used to the smell).

Sporting Achievement

Congratulations to Denika Clooney who placed 19th out of 113 runners at the 50th NZSSAA Cross Country Championships in Christchurch on the weekend. She ran in a time of 15.09 for the 4000m.                                                                                                                                                                                                

Maungaturoto Op Shop will be at school selling ball dresses 

Thanks to the support of our local community, Maungaturoto Op Shop will be at school on Tuesday, 2nd July, selling ball dresses for $25. Seniors, watch out for more details.