Welcome to Tautoru 2015

Dear Tautoru Families Welcome back to the new school year. We hope you have had fantastic holidays with your families and that your child is as excited as we are to be starting the 2015 school year in the Tautoru team. We would like to welcome four new children and their families to our team; Kirsty and Alastair Cunningham, Ari Zandi and Lucia Weddell. We would also like to say a big welcome to Aimee Elliott who has joined the teaching team in Tautoru. How will Tautoru work? Children will continue to get the opportunity to work with a wide range of children in a variety of group settings and with each of the four teachers within our team. We will be utilizing and taking every opportunity to use the great indoor and outdoor spaces available to us to maximize learning as well. Your child will start the school day with their base group teacher every morning for the first 10-15 minutes. In Literacy your child will have the opportunity to work with more than one teacher for their writing and reading. During this time your child will be writing, reading, and be engaged in instructional and independent tasks according to their needs. During their Numeracy sessions they will have one teacher who will take them for their small group guided maths sessions. This teacher will change throughout the year. They will also work with the other teachers when engaged in independent and larger group learning. In the afternoons, the children will work in groups across the junior school. During this time there will be a focus on teaching inquiry skills and exploring many learning areas of the very full curriculum! Our first inquiry ‘What is in my backyard?’ lends itself to a lot of opportunities to be scientists, archaeologists, inventors, creators and thinkers. On Thursday 26th February we will be running our first parent workshop; during this time we will be able to talk through our programme with you in far more detail and answer any questions you have for us. Details about this will be in next week’s newsletter. We are looking forward to seeing you at the Family Picnic next Wednesday.We would also love to see as many of you as possible at the powhiri to welcome new families on Friday 20th February at 9.30 am if you can make it. Morning tea will follow. 2015 promises to be a productive, action packed and exciting year. Please feel free to contact us at anytime if you have any queries via email or visit us in the Tautoru classroom before or after school. Our school emails are: djohanson@worserbay.school.nz aelliott@worserbay.school.nz gmenaker@worserbay.school.nz cturnbull@worserbay.school.nz> We look forward to catching up with you soon. Kind Regards Danny, Aimee, Chrissy and Gillian

End of Year Wrap

The entire community got together to celebrate a wonderful year and have a bit of a sing song. 

It is relatively informal, with families sitting and singing together.

It's also a time where we farewell our Year 6 graduates and they have an opportunity to say a few words! The Year 6 students were fantastic!

WBS Has Got Talent!

Talent from Matariki on Vimeo.

Today the student council ran a talent show. It was fun and awesome. There were musical instruments, singers, dancers and more. The judges rated the talented children and added the ratings up to see who would make it into the finals. The prize was a chocolate fish. By Louie

Coding Workshops- 13th December: Must do!

http://www.hackmiramar.org/hour-of-code/

Hack Miramar and Wellington Makerspace Trust are teaming up to put on a series of free one hour workshops that give everyone the chance to learn an 'Hour of Code'. It's all happening from 10am on December 13th 2014

at Scots College in Wellington.

These sessions are suitable for ages 4 to 104, so don't just bring the kids, give it a go yourself. The sessions can cater for complete beginners through to the slightly more adventurous.

This event is being run here in Wellington as part of a global series of events put on by volunteers and educators around the world during "Computer Science Education Week". Participants will have the opportunity to take part in sessions that start each hour, learning some aspects of programming as well as electronics and general technology concepts in just 60 minutes.

Teddy Bear’s Picnic

Teddy Bear’s Picnic

On Monday 15th December Tautoru will be heading down to Miramar Park for a Teddy Bear’s Picnic.  We will meet at school and walk down at about 9.30.  Children should bring their lunch, their Teddy and of course, sunhat, sunscreen and a water bottle.  We are planning a fun filled day of games and activities.   Hopefully by then the weather will have settled down but just in case we have the Tuesday as a postponement date.

Ruth, Danny, Chrissy and Gillian

The Balloon War

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Created with Padlet

A symphony of colour

 

In our science rotation today we explored what what happens when you put drops of food colouring and dish washing liquid in milk.  

Before we added the dish washing liquid it looked like this.

When we added the dishwashing liquid it looked like this.

The reason for this is the dish washing liquid is breaking down the fat in the milk.

You can find the instructions for this at Science Bob.