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:

Matariki Whānau Day

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 porotiti and koauau.

Wellbeing Wheel

What I can do to help increase my wellbeing and keep my Thinking Brain strong? What can I do every day to help me relax and feel well? This term, we have learned many different ways to relax, activate our body and help our Thinking Brain stay strong like listening to music, finding places to relax, making positive relationships, and tapping into our emotions and creativity.

We've we made our Wellbeing Wheels to help us think of small ways to relax and feel great that we can use every day. We have chosen four different things we could do to help us stay in our Thinking Brain and added them to our Wellbeing Wheel. Everyone has different ways to stay well.

What would you put in your Wellbeing Wheel?

We're Counting the Beat

In Tautoru we’ve begun to learn about beat, rhythm, and ways that we can create small sets of music in groups. We’ve done some drumming, rākau stick patterns, and music appreciation as well.

Last week tried body percussion after watching the work of Anna Meredith.

This week some of us put together a small musical Mexican wave using sets of four beats and a combination of sounds. Check it out!

Some of us still feel a bit shy about performing but we will be working on our bravery and love of learning so we can be ready for next term’s arts celebration.

Rat investigation

There has been a lot of interest in rats in Tautoru over the last couple of days. A couple of very inquisitive students have been searching under the deck by the big kids playground for signs of vermin!



As a consequence we have decided to do a quick scientific investigation into what creatures are lurking under the deck. We placed a number of small rodent tags that have a sweet treat to attract rats, mice, and hedgehogs.



After three days we will come back to the tags which will help us identify what is or isn't there.



Check out the blog for future rodent posts.