Positive Accomplishment through Goal Setting

Our Learner Attribute this term is “I am a Goal Setter”. We have been talking about what that means to us and identifying some new learning goals.

Setting goals is an important aspect of Positive Accomplishment - goals enable us to have a clear direction in life, providing us with a sense of purpose. Setting and accomplishing a challenging and worthwhile goal also leads to Positive Emotions, which we know has a positive impact on our wellbeing too!

As outlined by Norrish, J., Robinson, J. & Williams, P. (2011), Positive Accomplishment involves the capacity to work towards meaningful goals and the motivation to persist despite challenges and setbacks (Growth Mindset).

Knowing how to persist and persevere when faced with a challenge helps us to develop resilience, which will help us tackle obstacles that may pop up later on in life. 

Today we had our first 'Whanau Sharing' opportunity where we got to share our writing goals and pieces of work we were proud of with an older/younger buddy. 

 

It was great to receive feedbak from our buddies and get to share in their learning goals and successes too. Look at how awesome we were at listening to each other and taking turns to share out work!!

 

 

 



In a few weeks time we will have Student Led Conferences where we get to share our goals with you (the parents) and fill you in on how we are progressing towards all our learning goals. Keep an eye out on the Newsletter for further details.

                      

Exploring Language Features through Poetry

We have been learning about various language features we can use in our writing to create a more interesting piece for our readers. What better way to explore this concept through writing poetry!

Last week we explored similes and metaphors and used our senses to create a Winter poem. They were just beautiful! We also made some art to go with out published piece.

 

 

This week we have been creative with alliteration and onomatopoeia to write a Sound poem!

To create our poem we got into groups of 8. Each group broke into 2 smaller groups and came up with 4 lines each around our 'topic'. Then we came together to collaborate on our final piece of poetry. We used teamwork, fairness and perspective to 're-shape' and combine our sound poems, incorporating everyone's ideas.

We are so pleased with the final results! Here are some of them below. 

 

 

 

What is Music?

In five short weeks we will be inviting the community to celebrate in our Festival of the Arts. It is a fantastic opportunity for students to design, create, and celebrate their learning in a creative way. We are beginning to plan ideas in groups along with exploring sound.



This week we posed the question 'Everything is Music' and asked the students to agree, disagree, or if they were unsure. Students then explained their position and tried to persuade other students to change their initial position. After some toing and froing most of the students decided that everything was, or could be, music but it needed some sort of manipulation and pattern.





This clip youtube clip Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers did manage to sway some students from their original ideas and would be a great video to watch at home if you were wanting to continue the conversation at home.





Students were then given a range of 'instruments' to experiment with. They had glasses of water, shakers, tuned pipes, rubber bands, homemade noise objects, and drums without skins and we encouraged to create a range of sounds. The classroom was filled with a beautiful noise !

Drumming

What a brilliant day. We are so pleased to welcome back Andreas to Worser Bay and his wonderful drumming machine.



Andreas is here to help with developing our musical ideas for the Arts Festival. For the next 4 weeks literacy groups will be working with Andreas learning about rhythm, patterns, and following a lead.



We started the first session focusing on keeping a rhythm and following a simple 4X beat, quite a challenge for some of us and there were some great concentration and perseverance to be seen!



The students could select a drum of their choice and we had hand drums, sticks, and percussion instruments going wild!

Small and Big Ball Skills.

This term Tautoru are focusing on developing our small and big ball skills. We have a number of students currently playing miniball and netball for the school along with the very popular floorball in Term 4.



Students will be playing with hockey sticks and balls, basketballs, and padder tennis.



We have started this week practicing throwing and catching a ball to ourselves before adding another person into the mix! If the weather continues to be kind the students will work for 3 weeks on one particular skills before moving on to another.



Check out the blog for future PE posts.

Whanau Day with Ximena and John

After a wonderful morning starting at the beach and watching the sunrise, we had a whānau group rotation. There were many activities like weaving, dance, art and making Māori musical instruments.

Here are some people making Porititi and Koauau.

Matariki Celebrations: Weaving Stars with Shona and Nic

Today we worked in whanau groups and worked with different people across the school. We worked with different teachers too at different times of the day.

Nic and Shona Activities

We brainstormed the names of the stars and what each star is kaitiaki of. We were blown away by what the students already knew about the different stars.

We sang the Matariki song: 

Nga Tamariki O Matariki

Waitī, Waitā, Waipunarangi,

Tupu-ā-nuku, Tupu-ā-rangi, Ururangi e

Koinei ngā tamariki o Matariki

(These are the children of Matariki)

Ngā whetū e pīataata i te rangi e

(The bright stars that shine in the sky)

Ngā whetū e pīataata i te rangi e

(The bright stars that shine in the sky)

We worked with buddies to weave stars. We used wool and paper plates. We knew it would be tricky so we discussed what Character Strengths we could use to overcome these challenges. Some of the ideas were judgement, perspective, kindness, bravery, perseverance and zest.

We watched the beautiful story of the Seven Stars of Matariki read by the author, Toni Rolleston-Cummins: