We thought about what we like about ESOL and Hokowhitu School. Here are our ideas.We hope lots of people will join us at our school.

We made alphabet friezes. They were very good and we wondered who would get to keep them. After some discussion we decided to give them to the junior classes. They really liked them. Then we discussed, “Is it better to give or receive?” We decided, as nice as presents can be, it actually feels better inside to give a gift. The feeling lasts longer.

p.s. sorry about the sound quality.

During December we looked at different December festivals. We found out about Yule and created Yule cats. We learnt about Chanukah and made paper menorah and learned to play the dreidel game. We learnt that some people celebrate the birthday of Isa in December. We also looked at Christmas. There is a sad-looking tree up in the staff room at school. As a gift to the staff we made decorations to help improve the look. People admired our decorations but not the tinsel tree. Many of our ideas for the decorations came from the PM book “The Christmas Tree” by Beverley Randell. We are proud of what we did and happy we could give a gift to the staff of Hokowhitu School.

We also discussed Santa. We had many interesting ideas around this. We learnt how Bishop Nichollas evolved into Santa.

The middle ESOL group worked on improving their sentence structure and language choice in writing. We used wordless texts to build up stories over several days. We worked on quality rather than quantity.

The senior ESOL group decided they would like to do a unit on games. We learnt about heaps of different games, teaching each other. We created versions of kick-the-can, we played a game called ‘squirt’, we taught each other cat’s cradle and scoobys, and we played a number of traditional inside games. Here is just a tiny bit of what we did. These are examples of simple games with few rules. First we thought about what rules there are then we played them.