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Weekly Wrap Up

The Wrap Up (Term 4, Week 7)

Not long until the holidays now! This week’s Wrap Up is jammed packed with updates on all the exciting end of year activities that our junior students have been participating in, as well as an exciting opportunity to get involved with the Aotearoa Bike Challenge!

Important Dates

  • Friday 9 December: Junior Prizegiving in Herengatahi groups 
  • Friday 9 December: End of Term 4

Important Information

Sports and Cultural Photos

If your student was involved in a sport or co-curricular activity this year, then you may wish to download their group photos. Click on the link here, browse the gallery then enter your email address and the PIN 8197 to download images. The gallery will be available until the end of December.

The Aotearoa Bike Challenge

In February individuals and workplaces compete nationally to earn the most points by riding and encouraging others to do the same. You can ride anywhere, anytime from February – just a 10 minute ride is enough to take part.

  1. Enjoy a ride
  2. Log it here or connect your favourite cycling app (Strava or Map My Ride)
  3. Earn points, climb the leaderboards and win prizes!

You can take part with WHS:

With a club/group – clubs are a great way to keep track of how much riding you and your friends can do as part of the challenge. Once registered, you can be part of a WHS group and can see who else has registered/is taking part and can support each other’s progress.

For more information, follow this link!

Predator Free Wellington

Each month volunteer training sessions are held where volunteers are taught about installing bait stations, baiting and trapping. Each area has a coordinator/s and a group of trained volunteers who are going out on weekends installing bait stations, and once all are installed they will bait and check regularly.

To date 85 people have gone through the training, and groups are active throughout nearly all the buffer area. Their mahi is setting up for success in the second phase of the eradication project and it wouldn’t be possible without such passion and dedication and hard work. In the last 12 months, they have installed 292 bait stations throughout the area which is an amazing success.

Community groups are active in these areas already and have already established trap lines, hold regular planting days and have setup monitoring lines. After completing some initial training, Wellington High School are now managing our own network of devices and reporting our catches and bait take via Trap.NZ.

Keen to get involved? You can sign up HERE or find out more HERE. The next training session is being held on the 4th December.

What’s Happening?

Alexander Turnbull Library Trip 

‘He manako te kōura i kore ai’ – Wishing for a crayfish won’t get you one!

In the last two weeks, both Year 9 McKelvey English classes have visited The Alexander Turnbull Library in Molesworth Street. Stopping briefly for lunch along the way, we walked down town via the wharves all the way to the Railway Station and up Molesworth Street, past Parliament Buildings. With the new history curriculum coming in, this unique library collection is available as a resource for us all to use but it takes a bit of effort both to get there and to find your way around it. And the librarians are keen to have our students come more often but it takes quite an effort to make it happen!

As an example of what you can use theTurnbull collection for, Amy Watling, the Librarian was able to do some research, using the libraries vast resources. She decided to show us something about the place where our school is situated on Pukeahu using a little known Katherine Mansfield story “Ole Underwood’. From the information Amy showed us, we were able to glean a lot about life around Pukeahu 100 years ago and see how writers can use real characters and settings to create works of fiction. 

We were also shown examples of the kinds of things the library collects, such as newspapers and how these are stored on microfilm. The students enjoyed looking up their teachers names and addresses in the electoral rolls, even finding out Mr. Sutton’s middle name. 

It was great to get out and use the wonderful resources available in our city of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. Ngā mihi nui – many thanks to ngā mātua ko Johnie, rātau ko Graeme, ko Jeremy for accompanying us on our trips. Ngā mihi nui hoki ki ngā ākonga tino kaha me tino manawanui – much credit goes to our wonderful students who made us feel so proud of them and Te Kura Tuarua o Taraika ki Pukeahu.

Year 10 Art

Last Friday, Year 10 Art visited our neighbours Massey School of Art – Whiti o Rehua to see their end of year graduate exhibition Exposure. We had a talk in the Engine Room by artist and lecturer Simon Morris, who told us about Nathan Williams’ work Horse, created with paint made from horse blood and Loretta Riach’s work Details of a Haunting exploring the geological make up of Aotearoa.

We then explored the Fine Art and Photography shows and found a huge range of different approaches to art making. We were really interested in the processes used by Margaux Febvre-Richards in her work Dear Lover, so we experimented with plaster and fabric back at school to create our own artworks. Visiting Exposure is a great opportunity for our akōnga to be inspired and see the possibilities open to them to study art at university and the wide range of mediums they can explore.

NIWA Taihoro Nukurangi trip

Year 10 Science Enrichment visited NIWA / Taihoro Nukurangi last Friday. We were welcomed by the general manager of research Dr. Rob Murdoch and heard a talk from Dr. Natalie Robinson, who had just returned from Antarctica where a team of scientists was measuring changes in the sea ice, studying organisms below the ice and meeting some friendly seals. Students also got to visit the two supercomputers that Taihoro Nukurangi runs – they are capable of calculating two thousand trillion calculations per second. That’s about 700,000 times more processing power than your fancy gaming rig!

 

The Medical Examiner visited us

WHS parents and authors Dr Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell spoke to the science enrichment group about Dr Melinek’s role as a forensic pathologist based at Wellington Hospital. The students learned about the process that is followed whenever there is a suspicious death to be investigated in New Zealand. Dr Melinek and T.J. Mitchell donated copies of the three books they have published, about cases Dr Melinek investigated in the USA, to the school library.

He Kākano

The senior students made jam this week as thank you gifts for He Kākano duty staff. Juniors joined seniors for a workshop at the Te Whare Toi Wellington City Gallery, using stencils to paint motifs associated with a mural installation in Te Ngākau Civic Square. Friday is a farewell to seniors until they return next year! We finished the week with a friendly-competitive game of croquet, at the Waimarie Hutt Valley Croquet Club, organised by the Special Olympics.

Careers

Support from the Careers Team

Just a reminder that if you need support, you can contact the following people.

Chuni Bhikha – Careers Adviser – (bac@whs.school.nz)

  • Course information
  • course applications (Uni, Polytech)
  • Student finances (loans and allowances)
  • Career Planning – next steps, transitions
  • Apprenticeships
  • Credits review

Bec McKenzie – Careers Assistant – (mcr@whs.school.nz)

  • CV development
  • Interview practice
  • Looking for jobs