Special Events 2026

Term 1

Leadership Camp - Peel Forest with Year 7 students
Every second year our senior students attend Leadership Camp at Peel Forest. This year they spent their first evening building connections, playing
soccer, and enjoying board games together near the fire, a great way to settle in and strengthen teamwork. Day 2 brought more wet weather, but that didn’t dampen spirits. The students travelled to the Orari Gorge for an exciting abseiling experience. It was fantastic to see them stepping outside their comfort zones, encouraging one another, and demonstrating resilience and courage.

Bike Safety with Youthtown (Oamaru) and Constable Jay Morris
As part of our Health unit this term, we ran a bike safety morning with Constable Morris and Kale from Youthtown.  All bikes and helmets were checked and our students participated in bike safety lessons around our school grounds. 

Senior students then rode their bikes around the Omarama bike park and learnt about road crossings, travelling in convoy and safety aspects. Students showed enthusiasm and engagement and this was a very successful morning.

Omarama School swimming display

Here are our 3 Whanau family groups dressed up in their House colours, awaiting their teams swimming event. All ready to show support to their house mates.

Karearea group - Red, Kea group - Green, Kiwi group - Blue

Below is a classic rural farming photo of a few dads watching their kids participate in the annual swimming event, followed by the typical country BBQ and ice block. Beautiful weather made this day a truly special day.

Students who did well went on to compete with other schools in the Waitaki Valley area and then if successful ended up competing in the North Otago swimming event.

Building Connections with our local Playgroup
This term our Junior classroom welcomed a visit from the local Omarama Playgroup. The children came along and participated in waiata, story time
and play before sharing some kai together. This was a great opportunity to build connections between Omarama School and Omarama Playgroup.

This was a very successful visit and we will repeat this get together every term. This is a great opportunity for Omarama School to meet pre-schoolers in the area and their whanau and for Omarama School to showcase their warm and friendly environment.

Term 2

Local Curriculum Learning
Like most schools, Omarama weaves local curriculum throughout the curriculum year round. However last term many wonderful opportunities came our way and we enjoyed some exciting and relevant educational opportunities from in and around our local community.

Wool in Schools
The Wool in Schools programme is a free mobile educational initiative run by Campaign for Wool New Zealand that travels across Aotearoa to teach students about the sustainable benefits of wool. It features converted 20-foot shipping containers called "Wool Sheds," offering hands-on learning about wool production, design, and technology.

Our students thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity and with many of our school families belonging to the farming community, this was relevant learning where those students on farms could relate and show leadership within this unit of work and those students not on farm engaged in new learning opportunities.
One of our parents visited school to talk about wool and knitting and she also brought her spinning wheel along to show our students. We are so lucky to have this type of expertise in our community.

Trap and Transfer
In the Mackenzie Basin "trap and transfer" most commonly refers to the intensive conservation programs designed to manually assist native tuna (eel) in bypassing massive hydroelectric dams on the Waitaki River system.

The "trap and transfer" workers in Ōmārama are employed by or work directly for local Kāi Tahu rūnaka (the local Māori tribal councils), notably Te Rūnanga o Moeraki and Te Rūnanga o Arowhenua, in partnership with hydroelectric operators like Meridian Energy.

We were fortunate enough to receive a visit from The Trap and Transfer group, who had recently caught an eel, very close by. The eel was 60 years old, female, 4.5kg, 110 cm long and was extremely slimy. Our students were intrigued and asked multiple good questions. We thank our connections with Kōia te Mātauraka for this opportunity.

Bee Keeper Visit
Beekeepers (or apiarists) in the Mackenzie Country take advantage of the region's unique high-country flora, primarily harvesting prized blue borage (vipers bugloss) and native mānuka honey.

Omarama School had a visit from Tarsh at Swarming Sons, from Cairn Station near Twizel.

Tarsh talked to our students about the bee industry and explained how important bees are. She answered many questions, allowed the students to explore the many artifacts that she brought along and a couple of students even got to dress up in a bee keeper suit.

Following on from this learning the younger students incorporated some artwork by sketching sunflowers and creating a 3D bee to attach to their beautiful sketches

Waitaki Power Station visit
Living in Omarama we are fortunate to have Hydro Power stations nearby. As we are part of the ELC (Enriching Local Curriculum) programme we were able to reach out and arrange a visit to the oldest Power Station in the area.

The older students wrote explanation texts about how Benmore Dam generates electricity. Many students included labelled diagrams to help their reader understand how water moves through penstocks, spins turbines, turns generators, and then travels through transformers and power lines.

This visit transferred into writing where students were learning to organise information clearly, use technical vocabulary, and explain the cause-and-effect steps in a process.