Preparing for Matariki

Today, Worser Bay School have been getting their hands dirty in preparation for our Matariki celebration tomorrow. 

Suz talked to us about the different Matariki stars and what they are kaitiaki of. Tupuanuku is the kaitiaki of the food that grows in the ground, Tupuarangi is the kaitiaki of the forests and birds, Waiti is the kaitiaki of the freshwater animals and waita is the kaitiaki of the sea water animals. This is why we have vegetables grown from the ground, seafood and chicken in our hangi. It is said that the steam from cooking the food feeds the Matariki stars.

Remember the Matariki Celebration, with a BYO lunch and a nibble of the kai prepared today, starts at 12.50pm to 1.40pm. Students will still need to bring their own lunch as there isn't enough veges to fill all their bellies!

Many of us learnt a new skill, how to peel vegetables! Now they definitely can't use the excuse of they don't know how to when you ask them to help with dinner!

Keeping the Beat with Scott

 To finish off the term we have been delving into making some rhythms with instruments.  We revisited what we learned about the physics of sound (how sound travels in sound waves and it is caused by an energy source). Now it's our turn to be energy sources and make some sounds. 

We practised making a beat and putting our sounds together to create a composition. Scott showed us how to make a four bar pattern. We are going to miss Scott in our music and everything else next term. Haere rā, Scott.

We look forward to seeing you all refreshed next term for another great term of learning. Have a great holidays!

The Impasto technique

Tautoru are well into their Arts learning. In Visual Arts we have previously learnt how to hold a paintbrush, mixing colours, sketching techniques and how to hold a pencil effectively when sketching. In Music, we have learnt about listening to the beat and making our own beats with simple notation.

This week, we are learning a new painting technique called Impasto. We are basing our artwork off the artist, Banksy, with this portrait.

Here is the Impasto technique we followed. We talked about the new language of 'dubbing' the paintbrush, 'loading' the paintbrush so there is lots of paint and the different 'elements' that will be shown in each picture (such as Tanē Mahuta pushing Ranginui and Pāpatuanuku apart).

We started with an apple on small card to practise the impasto technique of 'dubbing' the brush with small strokes and thick paint rather than long strokes. We had to use a lot of Perseverance as this was very different to what we are used to!

We did a museum walk where we walked around the room to look at each others work. Then, we gave each other feedback before we moved onto our painting of Ranginui and Pāpatuanuku.

In Writing, we have been retelling the beginning, middle and end of the Creation myth of Ranginui and Pāpatuanuku so we were all very clear on how the myth went.

We then got into groups and decided who was going to paint the beginning, who was going to paint the middle and who was going to paint the end of the Māori myth.

We are going to put our art together into the sequence of the story just like how the artist model has lots of different paintings that make up one whole art piece.

Tēnā koutou! Our new te reo Māori learning

 We are starting new te reo Māori learning in Tautoru this week.

We're learning how to greet and farewell each other in lots of different ways. We're building up our te reo vocab so we can have full conversations in te reo Māori.

Here is a video that covers some of the greetings and farewells that we are learning.

Check out our skits from Thursday this week. This was after our first full lesson with this new kupu (words). Here we have some kids greeting each other, asking how each other are feeling and then farewelling each other.

Making our Garden Grow

 We have begun preparing our garden beds for our spring crop this week. We have investigated which seeds can be planted now that we can harvest in spring. This has given us lots of new language when we learn about words like sow and germination. We've had to select plants that are suited to the season and learn how to sow them according to the instructions on the packet.

We have also begun to learn about what we need to improve the soil for our when our seedlings are ready to plant. Even though it's winter, our garden is still full of life and opportunities for learning.

Winter Poems

Winter is definitely here! We can feel it and see it all around us, so we have been using our senses to describe winter and some of us wrote poems about it.

Some of us have been learning how to structure poems. Poems break quite a few rules of what we are used to in writing because we have to write lines instead of sentences. We have also been learning how to use precise adjectives and verbs, as well as similes and metaphors to make our ideas more powerful.

Here are some examples of our writing. If you come in you can see more examples of our writing on our Writers' Wall in Tautoru.