Living Lockdown with Zest and Creativity

 Well... this week has looked a bit different to normal! We've made the switch to Home Learning and zoom lessons. It has been so awesome to see many of your faces on the zoom calls. It's great to have that somewhat face-to-face interaction, even if it is through a screen!

Seesaw has been flooded with Creativity, Love of Learning and of course a whole lot of zest with those Wake Up Your Brain activities!

Check out some of the things that Tautoru have been doing this week:

Ximena and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the parents and whānau once again in supporting your child with Home Learning. We know this can be challenging in a busy time when working from home. So thank you, thank you, thank you!

Remember, keep the Home Learning sessions short and sweet and remember those brain breaks to keep our brains and body fresh!

Squareness- Problem Solving

 

On Friday we worked with the Year 4 students from Māhutonga.

We are learning about the properties of a square and problem solving together. We explored the concept of “squareness.” We know that a square has 4 equal sides and 4 right angles. 

We asked: How many squares can you find that have dots from this array as their corners?

Our brains are growing!

City Gallery Visit Whakapapa- Our Stories

As  part of our Inquiry- Whakapapa: Our Stories, we visited the City Gallery. We learned about our connection to the Johnson Witehira mural ‘Ngā Kākano The Seeds’ (near Te Ngākau Civic Square) and created artworks based on our pepeha.

The City Gallery education team taught about the story behind the mural: the whakapapa of Taraika who Whāngahui-a-Tara (the great harbour of Tara- Wellington) is named after. He was a chief who descended from the great navigator Whatonga who sailed to Aotearoa in Kurahaupō Waka.

Some of us use Whānaganui-a-Tara in our pepeha as our moana (ocean) because it is our harbour too, so now we can make the connection between our story and Taraika.

After discussing how the different art elements (ideas) in the artwork, we headed to the gallery's classroom to create screen prints of our pepeha.

You can pop in to Tautoru to see all our finished art works.

It was wonderful to notice and learn about how the art around our city is connected to our personal stories. We hope we can keep spotting art all around and find new links to how art can fit into our lives.

The Gruffalo

This week we have been dialling up our Creativity to describe the Gruffalo. We revisited descriptive language such as adjectives, similes and metaphors.

Check out some of our author's work below.

Here is a read aloud of The Gruffalo story if you haven't read the book yet. We love it!

The Whakapapa of Ranginui and Papatuanuku

This week, we learnt more about the Atua and children of Ranginui and Papatuanuku. 

Haumiatiketike is the atua of wild and uncultivated foods. To explore our learning about Haumiatiketike, Ximena showed us some harakeke (flax) weaving she has been doing as harakeke is one of the children of Haumiatiketike. Then, we did some weaving.

Rūaumoko is the atua of earthquakes and volcanoes. Here is a story to learn more about this atua that we watched together.

After we learned about all of Ranginui and Papatuanuku's children, we did a sorting activity to sort who the atua's children belong to (e.g. Rongomātane's children are kūmara and carrots).

This afternoon we put together all of our learning so far and did some quick role plays of the whakapapa of Ranginui and Papatuanuku. Check out Seesaw to watch the videos.

Ask us at home to talk about the whakapapa of Ranginui and Papatuanuku!