A Starry Night

Check out the unveiling of this great piece of artwork by the Edgewater Jnr team. Awesome work guys!

Salads and other vegetables will be in abundance for Room 26. Thanks to St Kentigern College

St Kentigern College supporting Sommerville classes,House and Room 26 during a gardening programme. Mark Robinson delivered a number of seedlings ready to be planted for the class gardens.

Kay Scott, Room 26 class teacher, expressed that she would like to produce enough for her class cooking sessions. Salads and other vegetables will be in abundance this time she reckons!

Students and teachers prepared the garden bed and planted their choice of plants.

Sir Murray Halberg visits Sommerville

Sir Murray Halberg ,Steve Hall ,newly appointed CEO for the Halberg Trust, together with Stacey Roach, Sports Opportunity Adviser Counties Manukau visited us on the 9^th of November.

We are working in partnership with the Halberg Trust to promote Sports Ability games in our school. Sports Ability games include polybat, table cricket, goal ball, boccia and sitting volleyball.

A group of students are also training hard to compete in the 2009 Sports ability Games on the 27th November 2009 which is our final competition of our sports calendar.

Pink Day at Sommerville

What a great day we all had recently when we dressed in pink to raise money for breast cancer. The staff and students all got into it with pink costumes, pink food, singing and dancing and general frivolity. We raised over $700 too! A big thank you to everyone who got involved and organised this great day!

Mooncake Festival

The Edgewater Jnr class has created this great video about the Chinese Mooncake Festival. Awesome job guys!

St Kents Partnership is Champs!

All year a group of students from St Kentigerns have been coming to Sommerville once a week to help out in the classrooms and work with some of our students.It has been a great experience for all of us. They have also been helping out with different projects around our school and most recently have donated 10 computers for use in the classroom.What a tremendous thing to do! Thanks to everyone involved from St Kents for what has become a great parnership.

Eastern & Bays Courier feature Sommerville students!

Photo: AMELIA JACOBSEN

FUN TIMES: Sommerville Special School students really got into the hip hop day. From left: Nathan Keu, 12, Keenan Rasmussen, 11, partly obscured: Kaimoana Vaitohi, 14, Chance Te Whare, 14, Celene Thompson, 14, Monica Manawatu, 9. Front: Zinmar Hla, 12.

The students weren't the only ones who got into the spirit of Sommerville Special School's second hip hop day – the teachers also dressed up, and danced the day away.

More than 50 students travelled to Tamaki Recreation Centre last month to enjoy a day full of dancing, music, competitions and most of all fun.

Physical education and sports co-ordinator Ashwin Prasad says he had never seen some of the students move in the way they did.

"To see them expressing themselves though dance is just amazing," he says.

"They're really into it – music just makes them move."

There were freestyling, rapping and krumping competitions, and everyone was treated to a performance by the Bring it On – All Stars high school dance group.

Mr Prasad says these opportunities have to be created for the students so they have a way of expressing themselves, "because they don't often get the chance".

A group of five sports management students from Unitec had invited the school to participate.

The planning, preparation and delivery of the three and a half hour event was part of their event management paper.

Unitec student Gemma Delia was in awe of the students' stamina.

"I didn't expect them to be so in to it but they've been going hard since the word go," she says