Thursday 26 February 2015






A Day in the Life of Tautoru on PhotoPeach

Thursday 19 February 2015

The Night Sky - By Jupiter

A black carpet filled the sky as it turned to night. 
I smelt the day fade away.
I felt darkness gather around and I heard the silent moon rise at the beach.

Wednesday 18 February 2015

Calling all Gardeners, Geologists, Scientists, historians and interested Inquirers

Dear Families

As we are venturing into our discovery of all things wonderful in our backyard we would love to have the expertise of any parents who would be be willing to come and share their knowledge and expertise with us.

If you are interested in visiting the Tautoru Classroom please let Aimee, Chrissy, Danny or Gillian know. We would love to have some visitors over the next few weeks during the students Finding Out  stage of their inquiry.

Thanks from the Tautoru teaching team.


Thinking Like a Scientist - Our discovery into 'What's in our backyard'


                                             'What's in our backyard?'

The Tautoru team are well on their way with their inquiry about 'What's in our backyard?'.
We have been tuning in and finding out about what's in our own backyard, our school and local beach backyard. 

Some Tuning In  questions the students have been pondering have been...

  • What is a backyard?
  • What do I have in my own backyard?
  • What are the similarities and differences between my own backyard and our Worser Bay School backyard?
  • What have we found out about our fellow Teacher's backyards? 
  • What can we see, feel, hear and touch at our own Worser Bay Beach?
  • How can we beautify our own school backyard and environment? 
  • What are we curious to find out? 
  • How do sunflowers grow? 

Have a look at some fantastic photos of some of Tautoru students planting their own sunflower seeds. They are going to track their Sunflower seeds progress over the coming weeks and eventually plant them in our own school backyard to beautify our environment. 















What makes me Extraordinary...




I am an amazing surfer. I can surf all the way to dry sand!
I also can surf tidal waves. I can write as fast as a rocket!
I can swim 1,000 kilometres and I can run as fast as a cheetah. I am strong and I can lift a house. I can bake a pie in one second. I have a great sense of smell and I can smell a dog from a mile away.

Theo B

Friday 13 February 2015

My Extraordinary Day

On my extraordinary day I went to attack the dinosaurs. I tried to push through but that didn’t work. There were T Rex's and triceratops guarding me. I had nothing but my sword. I got my sword. Now it was a fight. I swung my sword. The dinosaurs moved fast, back and back. I saw my sword shining with silver. I was getting tired. The fight was almost over. I saw a tyrannosaurus. I had only one chance. I jumped on its back. It flew me back home. What an extraordinary day it had been. By Liam
Tautoru are going to the beach on Monday from 9.30-11am as apart of our Inquiry - What's in our backyard? If you are able to help during this time please email cturnbull@worserbay.school.nz before Monday.

Thanks, Tautoru team 

Tautoru's week 2 principal awards. These guys have been thinking like scientists.

Practising our Haka for the powhiri next week

During literacy time the water group has been working in teams to put stories back in order and have been being word detectives looking in newspapers for their rainbow words!

Wednesday 11 February 2015

Pizza Oven: Nearly Finished


We have been investigating the installation of the pizza oven. 
We can't wait for it to be finished! 

Thursday 5 February 2015

Tuning Into Our Backyard Inquiry Term 1 2015

Our New Inquiry--What's In My Backyard?


We are exploring what lives in our backyards.  As part of our tuning in stage of the inquiry we would like to encourage the children to take the long weekend to investigate like scientists and capture images with photographs, drawings, videos, writing, etc of our own backyards.  Please bring in any artifacts, objects of interest and images that have been collected over the weekend.  


Thanks.,

The Junior Team

Tautoru morning routines

Created using Pic Collage. http://pic-collage.com




Sent from my iPad

Wednesday 4 February 2015

Welcome to Tautoru 2015

Dear Tautoru Families Welcome back to the new school year. We hope you have had fantastic holidays with your families and that your child is as excited as we are to be starting the 2015 school year in the Tautoru team. We would like to welcome four new children and their families to our team; Kirsty and Alastair Cunningham, Ari Zandi and Lucia Weddell. We would also like to say a big welcome to Aimee Elliott who has joined the teaching team in Tautoru. How will Tautoru work? Children will continue to get the opportunity to work with a wide range of children in a variety of group settings and with each of the four teachers within our team. We will be utilizing and taking every opportunity to use the great indoor and outdoor spaces available to us to maximize learning as well. Your child will start the school day with their base group teacher every morning for the first 10-15 minutes. In Literacy your child will have the opportunity to work with more than one teacher for their writing and reading. During this time your child will be writing, reading, and be engaged in instructional and independent tasks according to their needs. During their Numeracy sessions they will have one teacher who will take them for their small group guided maths sessions. This teacher will change throughout the year. They will also work with the other teachers when engaged in independent and larger group learning. In the afternoons, the children will work in groups across the junior school. During this time there will be a focus on teaching inquiry skills and exploring many learning areas of the very full curriculum! Our first inquiry ‘What is in my backyard?’ lends itself to a lot of opportunities to be scientists, archaeologists, inventors, creators and thinkers. On Thursday 26th February we will be running our first parent workshop; during this time we will be able to talk through our programme with you in far more detail and answer any questions you have for us. Details about this will be in next week’s newsletter. We are looking forward to seeing you at the Family Picnic next Wednesday.We would also love to see as many of you as possible at the powhiri to welcome new families on Friday 20th February at 9.30 am if you can make it. Morning tea will follow. 2015 promises to be a productive, action packed and exciting year. Please feel free to contact us at anytime if you have any queries via email or visit us in the Tautoru classroom before or after school. Our school emails are: djohanson@worserbay.school.nz aelliott@worserbay.school.nz gmenaker@worserbay.school.nz cturnbull@worserbay.school.nz> We look forward to catching up with you soon. Kind Regards Danny, Aimee, Chrissy and Gillian