Our Place in Space - Term 4 Inquiry

 

In Tautoru we are absolutely fizzing with the endless possibilities for learning when it comes to Space and the Solar System.  

Through our Inquiry learning in Tautoru we aim to enhance our curiosity and interest in science.  The solar system captivates students' imaginations, sparking curiosity about space, planets, and night day.  This is a topic that the kids were curious about at the end of Term 3 and actually all the time it seems !! 

It is funny, we often find ourselves as teachers very conscious that we don't want to be rocking out the same contexts every year and space and dinosaurs are often what we experienced at Primary School despite being the most captivating and exciting for our kids. They bring a huge amount of prior knowledge and can make many connections across these contexts !

Exploring concepts such as gravity, orbits, and the conditions for life on other planets encourages students to think critically and ask questions.  We will also go a bit deeper learning about our star, the sun and the moon and how it impacts our environment.  Learning about the solar system connects across many different curriculum areas. Maths is a no brainer with many opportunities to measure, make patterns, learn about time, tides etc….. 

Our big ideas and deep understandings for this Inquiry are:

OUR STAR THE SUN, THE MOON AND THE SKY.

1. The Sun is the ultimate source of energy for life on Earth.

2. Earth's system is a small part of a solar system within the vast system of the universe.

3. We order the visible stars of the night sky in the patterns that our cultures have taught us.

4. Our position in space governs what celestial objects we can see. 

5. The change in relative positions of the Moon, Earth, and Sun determines the apparent change in the shape of the Moon.  

6. The way the Moon's gravity pulls on the spinning Earth causes the environmental pattern of tides.

Through our curiosity, questions and discussions about Earth’s place in the solar system we can make endless connections to our place in the world.  Tides and the ocean are definitely front and centre in our local curriculum so lots of opportunities there.  

COLLECTING FIRST IDEAS

The students worked in co-operative groups to brainstorm all they knew about Space.  Here are their first ideas and the wealth of knowledge they already bring to this inquiry.   This task also helps us identify any misconceptions we have.  

Keep watching for regular updates on this exciting Inquiry 

A festival of Chinese language!

  

September 22nd to 28th is Chinese language week. We were very keen to celebrate since we have a number of Mandarin speakers in our school community. Luckily, we had four expert teachers who joined us on the last day of term: Kurt, Clare, Yinjing and Ruotong. We are so grateful to them for sharing their language and culture with so much Zest and Creativity: xie xie! 

Here are some highlights from an action-packed morning of learning.

Aisha and Everette helped out with some role-plays. We practised saying 'xie xie' (thank you), 'ni hao' (hello), 'dui bu qi' (sorry) and other handy phrases.

Then we had a chance to do some writing. Kurt showed us how some Chinese words look like their meaning. This helps a lot when learning thousands of characters. 

We even got to act out some of the words. 'Zuo' means 'sit' and looks like two people sitting back to back on a bench.

Here is 'shui' (water), which looks like three gushing streams of water.

'Shan' is a mountain. This mountain has three peaks, with the tallest peak in the middle.

We had a go at writing the characters. It was fascinating also to hear about how the character for words like 'horse' have evolved from a literal picture of a horse into the stylised character that is used today.

Next, some music! Yinjing and Ruotong shared a beautiful, traditional song about the jasmine flower. We have been learning a lot about different kinds of musical instruments lately, but seeing and hearing the accordion played as something new for us.  

Finally, some crafting with Clare, who showed us how to make delicate paper flowers by folding and cutting paper. 

It took quite a lot of concentration, careful drawing and cutting to make the flowers.

Opening out the folded paper to reveal the flower was very satisfying! We will definitely be making more of these.

Thank you once again to our wonderful teachers. We are so fortunate to have parents in our community who share their expertise and passions so generously. 

Last Week of Term Celebrations - Celebrating Chinese Language Week 2024

We celebrated Chinese Language Week this week and today we were fortunate to have some of our Chinese Whānau from Autahi come to share some learning, language, songs and crafts with us.  We all had an absolute blast !    

Xie Xie , Thank You to Kurt and Clare and Ruotong and Yinjing for all their planning and enthusiasm.  We loved the role plays and making the traditional chinese decorations.  It was a lovely end to Term 3.  We look forward to using the phrases we learnt together next term. 

Deep Sea Dive!

We have not slowed down in Tautoru after our amazing (if we do say so ourselves!) Arts Celebration performance. We have turned our attention for the remainder of the term to the Deep Seas. 

Our Oceans are consist of many zones. Check out this picture:

We have been focusing on the midnight zone and below. From the midnight zone downward there isn't get really any light at all, and the creatures who live there have adapted to survive in this unique environment. They look and act differently to those higher up in the oceans. 

We have been looking at an amazing magazine called the Deep Seas by the Kiwi Conservation Club (https://kcc.org.nz/). It has great resources that we've been 'diving' into. Using magazines as our main source of learning has been a great opportunity to amplify this amazing, physical source of media. Our focus on written text is also helping our students make the shift learning to read to reading to learn. An important lifelong skill. 

Here are some of the amazing resources we have made to show our learning so far, ka pai Tautoru tamariki! 

Deep Sea Creatures that we have been learning about. 

Tautoru Time Travellers - Te Ao Hurihuri 2024

Thriving, flourishing, shining !!  There is no one word that encapsulates the immense pride we felt this week as our Tautoru students demonstrated over a term’s worth of learning across the curriculum. 

The storyline would hopefully become pretty obvious as we danced and sang but the ‘ground work’ that went into making this storyline exciting and performable is often the part that is not given a second thought.   Throughout the last 2 terms, reading and writing helped our students' imaginations soar.  We read and crafted our own stories and poems and we worked on understanding different elements of poetry,  narrative, setting, plot and characters.  Maths and Music helped us with our patterns and rhythm.  Inquiry enabled us to explore some important themes and we identified some unique ‘characters’ living in our environment.   With all of this learning under our belt, we went for it, creating something pretty amazing.   

We saw some students dial up their Bravery, their Humour and Zest while some dialled things down.  So many successes on a number of different levels.   Thanks to all those that made this magic happen.