Congratulations to the Year 9 Readers Cup Competitors:

Julius Siu (Team Captain), Meggy Al-Nuaimi, Christian Fa'aui, Jan Maglangit and Jett Nash.

The team came 7th out of 14 schools at the recent tournament held at Sacred Heart College. All five students read six New Zealand novels over Term 2, meeting every week to test each other on the book's characters, themes and content. They performed extremely well against schools with much larger Year 9 student numbers and enjoyed the large lunch provided by our hosts.

We had over 50 students sign up for the Term 2 Chess Competition which ran every lunchtime for the past four weeks. Congratulations to our Winner, Noah Faalogo-Lilo from Year 11.

Runner-ups were Michael Te'o, Ardyn McCarthy and Jayden Veitch-Tamati, all from Year 11. It was a very hard-fought battle with Years 7 to Year 13 students all competing against each other. Huge acknowledgment and thanks to Finn Lloyd (Year 12) for organising and managing the competition.

Over the last few weeks we have been learning about, and celebrating, Matariki in the library. Miguel Ragat and Roman Fruean created a beautiful Matariki poster for the library, which sits above our large collection of books on the Pleiades star cluster and its first rising in late June, marking the beginning of the new year in the Māori lunar calendar.

Next term we are all about the 'Olympics' and have an Olympic Ambassador orgainised for a school visit to come and inspire the students in early August. We are also running a competition testing the students on their Olympic general knowledge. Each class will be asked questions relating to the Olympics and the class with the most correct answers by the end of the games will win a PIZZA lunch.

Happy holidays and as Saint Augustine said, “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”