book week

Every year, in Term 3, we have a book character day.  Children (and teachers) come to school dressed up as a book character and in the evening we hold a book quiz where student teams compete against the parents. We usually invite Scholastic or Page and Blackmore to join us for the day and hold a book fair where parents, children and the community can browse and purchase a large selection of books.

MUsic Lessons

Once a week our Music Teacher Maria comes to school and provides individual lessons for children who are keen to learn either piano, guitar (including electric) and violin.

Field Day 

In Term 4 each year we hold a field day. This is an opportunity for children to showcase their pets as well as other skills like art, cooking, craft and colouring. It's a great opportunity for the school and wider community to get together as we host a shared lunch and afternoon tea.

Tramping

One of our highlights at Lake Rotoiti School is tramping in the National Park.  We spend time learning about bush survival, fire lighting, crossing rivers and eating toasted mashmallows!!  We explore local walks in our area and go on overnight tramps to the various huts around us.

School Production

Every second year we aim to put on a production involving the entire school. Our past productions have been lots of fun and really quite spectacular.

We have produced:
2016: Archibald's War
2014: Treasure Island
2012: The Snow Queen

Sailing on the lake

Yachting New Zealand spend several days with us each year, teaching older children to sail in Optimist boats.  We value this activity as one of the ways that we get to learn new things in our unique environment.

During Terms 1 and 4 the Lake Rotoiti Sailing club meet at the lake to continue building on the kids sailing skills followed by a shared BBQ. This is a community event and everyone is welcome to join.

School Camp

We aim for the whole school to go on school camp every year.  This is paid for by Kea Kai fundraising, which is why it is so essential that every family supports Kea!  In recent years we have had camps to Bridge Valley, Mistletoe Bay, the Marae at Golden Bay and Totaranui.  The photos below are from Mistletoe Bay, 2014.

Stream care programme

In 2018, Faye from Whitebait Connection visited our school.  She introduced us to many new ideas and special little micro organisms.  We spent time at two of the local streams accessing how healthy the water ways were, by the amount and types of orhanisms we  caught.  2019 we lead us in to continuing with this programme, monitoring the streams and sharing our information with Doc.  

swimming

During the summer months we swim in our pool every day!  We have intensive lessons from qualified instructors - we believe that living in a lakeside environment, which also has lots of rivers, it is vital that our children are competent swimmers with basic life-saving skills.

winter sports

Our alpine environment offers the ideal opportunity for our students to take part in winter sports!  Skiing has long been a key element of our sports programme - we aim to ski for 5-7 days during Term 3.  We also like to skate on the natural skating pond when the opportunity arises.

year 7 and 8 city experience

We like to take our students to experience the city at some point during Year 7 and 8.  We find that taking just the older students allows us to pack lots more in to our days away from St Arnaud and can visit places more suited to older children.  Most recently we've been to visit Wellington; we visited the Beehive, the observatory, the New Zealand Portrait Gallery, various museums (Te Papa of course!) and the Bolton Hotel (we had a private tour - including the suite where Katy Perry stayed!).  We were able to fly from Blenheim to Wellington - it was the first time some children had been on a plane.