International Dot Day

Friday 15th September was International Dot Day. This day is a celebration of creativity, courage and collaboration in response to the book "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds.

We spent our morning celebrating Dot Day in Tautoru, using our character strengths of creativity, curiosity and teamwork.

Have a look below to read the poem we shared together about a dot.

Then we got busy creating our own dot, adding patterns, shapes and all sort of designs to make it our own. We coloured it in with crayon, used sharpie to make parts stand out and then added some dye over the top. Each dot looked completely different and unique.

We added our dots together to create a large collaborative artwork which celebrates how creative all of us are. Pop by and admire our project.

Tuesday ...

Tuesday was a busy day in Tautoru. The children spent the day using their creativity to make different types of skeleton art. They also played some super fun and interactive maths games that explored the idea of probability and chance.

Come in and see our crazy skeletons, bending and twisting in all sorts of directions.

Here we are playing and recording the game "Rock Paper Scissors" to explore the idea of Probability and chance.

Fitness Frenzy!

This term our Inquiry has centered around the power of our bodies. We now understand heaps about what and how our body systems work and have shared lots of information on how we can keep our body and mind healthy. 

This week our challenge was to create a fitness routine that would strengthen our entire body! In our groups we came up with all sorts of exercises and routines to get our hearts pumping, our bodies moving and our muscles working! Some of the routines we came up with were made up of exercises specific to gymnastics, parkour, tennis and taekwondo.

As of late we have been focusing on the "celebration" part of the Inquiry cycle. We have become much more confident in finding different ways to share and celebrate our new knowledge. We have also been talking a lot about "Taking Action". These routines do just that!

Today we shared our routine to another group and used the rubrics/success criteria below to give each other feedback about each routine. We really enjoyed giving feedback to each other and agreed on our next steps.

Character Day with Wanwan and Gabrielle's whanau group

 Today we got into whanau groups to learn some more about character strengths. We created some plays showing different character strengths and others watching gave us feedback and told us what character strengths our plays had. Humour was a strength of everyone - come to assembly on Friday for an example.

We also watched this video about two frogs... can you work out what character strengths they were using?



Then, like the frogs, we also made butter from cream. Ask us how! Some groups used real perseverance because they were trying and trying with milk instead of cream!!

Lastly we made up our own games especially focused on one or two of the character strengths. It was a fin day together.


Character day.
Today was character day and we did all sorts of fun activities in our whanau group which in case you don't know is a group with our siblings and some people from a Autahi, tautoru, mahutonga and matariki. My whanau group made butter from cream and we made up our own games and demonstrated how to play the games we made up and the last thing we did was make up our own plays.
By Nela

today was really fun we got jars fulled of cream all of us shakes the jars into butter. I loved it when one-one gone and PRANKED US!!! filling some of the jars with milk instead of cream it was cool and annoying we did this in groups of course my group was one of the pranked groups!
By Ruby

today we had whanau day and we got into our groups and what we did was we made cream and also ate it, we made our own games and we played splash.I learnt that it is really hard to make up your own games.
By Cruz

Character Day - Gillian and Susie's Base Groups

Today we got together in our Whanau Groups to spend most of our day exploring and using our Character Strenghts.

Gillian and Susie's Whanau Groups started the morning off sharing the story "Beautiful Oops". This book was all about turning mistakes into something beautiful using the stregth of creativity.

We used all sorts of material to create "mistakes" and turn them into something awesome. We added all of our creations to a collaborative mural.

Experimenting with dye. We used straws to blow the dye into different patterns, shapes and objects.

We used watercolours and turned torn newspaper into animals, volcanoes and many other things.

We folded card and origami paper and used the folds to create lots of different art pieces.

Some of us tried this Imagination "Warm Up" where we had to use our creativity to turn random lines, squiggles and marks into other things.

We used circles, holes and other craft scraps to create pictures and mini stories.

And here is the final product...our collaborative mural celebrating all of our creative "mistakes".

After morning tea our group listened to the story "The Most Magnificent Thing" which was all about perspective. After unpacking what perspective actually is we worked in groups to create a movie showing people when, how and why they could use this character strength (you can find these on Seesaw).

Positive Accomplishment in Tautoru!

Over the last week Tautoru has been a hive of activity as we have been diving into Student Led Conferences and sharing our wonderful learning and achievements with our whanau.

It was great to see the children leading their parents in conversations around their learning, discussing their goals and showing their whanau many of the things we do at school. The teachers and parents were so impressed with the leadership that we saw!

We enjoyed teaching our parents some Te Reo.

We spent some time reading and sharing stories that we had written.

Lots of us enjoyed creating an obstacle course to challenge our parents!

It was nice to teach our parents some Rainbow Breathing, we enjoy breathing exercises after a busy lunch.

Here are some comments from our children about SLCs:

"It was good because I enjoyed the feedback that my mum and dad gave me about my goals".

"It was fun because Dad doesn’t often get to see what I do at school. He was impressed".

"So great! I had fun with mum making and doing a tricky obstacle course".





"I enjoyed teaching mum the rainbow breathing that we do at school and I was proud of the goals I am working on". 

"Dad came to see me at school for SLC's it was really nice because he doesn't get to come and see what I do very much".

"I liked playing tennis with mum and dad, it was a challenge on the Scavenger Hunt".

"It was so cool to have mum and dad stay at school with me so that I could teach them rainbow breathing. It was fun".





"I loved showing mum the work I have been doing because she said she was very proud".

Nic and Scott's Whanau Group: Character Day 2017- Our Movies