World Writing Buddies - Building Positive Relationships

Last term everyone in Tautoru wrote letters that were sent to children at two schools - one in Australia and one in Luxembourg.  

This week a group of us received our first replies back and boy were we excited to find out about our writing buddies in Australia!

Some of us found we had things in common with our buddies - they liked rugby, were the same age and some had been born in NZ. Their school sounded different to ours...they had FIVE playgrounds and weren't as lucky to have a view as beautiful as ours!

Taking part in the World Writing Buddy programme gives our learners an authentic purpose for writing. It is a unique learning experience and is a great way to practise our writing an communication skills. Our children were motivated and engaged to send a reply. They had many questions they wanted to ask their new friends across the Tasman.

Being involved in a collaborative programme like this also helps our children to continue developing positive relationships. Although we may not meet our writing buddy face to face, (but maybe one day...) sharing information about our culture, interests and finding things we have in common helps us to develop a strong connection. We also learn to practise patience - we have had to wait a long time for our (snail) mail to arrive but it was the best feeling ever receiving a letter that was just for me!

Mindfullness Tuesday

Before heading to swimming on Tuesday we were lucky to have the students from Autahi join us in Tautoru. The students worked through a number of different activities that had a mindfulness focus.

Some of the activities were quite challenging and required a significant amount of focus to complete. Shona worked with a group of students and taught them how to finger knit. You may notice a number of creative bracelets, headbands, or worms around the class or even at home!

Another group followed a very engaging and fun Star Wars yoga routine with Darth Vader breathing and Yoda poses.

There was also a beading group. Our fine motor skills were getting a good work out at this station. We were able to see the students using and developing a number of character strengths along with working independently and in teams to complete activities. As the weather remained wet and wild outside their was a calming focus inside the classroom.  

Chess

We have  introduced chess to Tautoru and it is a hit! It has been fantastic to see a number of students share their knowledge and strategies with others along with building resilience when the game doesn't quite go as planned.



Chess sparks creativity and increases problem-solving skills. A chess match requires fast thinking and problem solving on the fly and we are seeing this in the students. We are still working on understanding the rules as there appears to be some creative moves on the board.



Pop into Tautoru and get your chess on!

Kaitiaki groups update - Team Worm

Our Kaitiaki groups have been busy creating prototypes for bird feeders, which will soon be tested in the wet and wild Wellington weather, Team Pollinators have begun preparing the planter boxes, and Team Tree are busy creating signs and posters to inform the community about showing care in our environment.



Team Worm have been researching facts about worms, learning about their needs, and their very  important role in our gardens and within the soil.

Fact #1 - The life span of a worm is 4 -5 years.

We have also created designs for our own worm farms. The plan is to create 3 or 4 smaller worm farms for the class in order to understand what we need to do to keep the worms happy, the type of food they need, and how we can use the worm wee; look out Team Trees !

Flow chart for creating a worm farm.




We spent an afternoon this week digging in our school gardens investigating the types of worms we have. It was great to get outside after a week of rain and cold weather.

We are happy to report that our gardens were filled with worms of varying sizes and energy levels. After spending some time observing them in the classroom we returned them home.

We were lucky to have a box of Tiger worms delivered to school this week and we hope to have our worm farms up and running this week.

Pop into Tautoru and introduce yourself !

Symmetry

In Maths we have been learning about symmetrical patterns and where the line of symmetry is. We have been making bugs that are symmetrical.

It was tricky to get both sides exactly the same!

We found out that we were more successful if we doubled the paper and cut out both sides at the same time. Have a look at some of our finished bugs.

Statistics

We have been learning about collecting, sorting, graphing and explaining data. We measured and compared the heights of the beans we got from our visit to the Botanical Gardens.

We measured the height in centimetres. Some people had 1cm, some had 5cm, some had over 10cm and some had lots of the numbers in between. It was interesting that they were all planted on the same day, and yet there were lots of different heights.

We then made a tally chart and a graph of our results.

We learnt how to fill in the tally chart. We know that when we want to show five marks we draw four lines and then one across them, like four fingers on your hand and your thumb across.

I Am Powerful Plan

Life is full of great moments and moments when things don't go the way we thought that they would. How do we learn to make the best choices when we are feeling angry or mad or sad?

Tautoru has been learning about different emotions over the past weeks, and now we have begun to learn about the Thinking Brain and the Emotional Brain. These two brains -or parts of our brain- help us to understand how we feel and make decisions about how we act. The scientific terms are the prefrontal cortex (Thinking Brain) and the amygdala (Emotional Brain).

But what do we do when the Emotional Brain gets overwhelmed? How can we come back to our Thinking Brain and make a good decision? We have been learning different ways to calm our Emotional Brain by breathing. Have a look at some ideas here:

We have made a plan so we can be powerful and make better choices when situations get tricky.

We started by thinking of some things that might provoke our Emotional Brain, then brainstormed what character strengths might help us get back to our Thinking Brain.

Now we have a plan for when we might face challenges, and we will be practising how to make our brains powerful and make a good choice. Our plans might change over time as we learn more.

We would love to share some of the different breathing strategies that we have learned so ask us and we can show.