Getting ready for a Mihi Whakatau

In Term 3 we welcome all the new students and their whānau to Worser Bay School with a Mihi Whakatau. This is a Māori welcome that is like a pōwhiri but a bit smaller and shorter.

We have been busy practising waiata and haka with Mātua Hēnare. We work hard to learn all the new moves and the words.

We use Zest, Perseverance and Love of Learning to help us.

Some of us get to be kapa haka leaders for the session and tell everyone when to start. This is how we practise using Leadership.

Preparations for our Arts Celebration

The final touches are being made, the excitement is building, and now we are preparing our soundscapes to go with our art works. We can't give too much away... but take a quick peek at what we're preparing for next week!

Finishing our art works...

Creating symbols for our soundscapes...

Our Play Spaces- Writing

What are our favourite play spaces at Worser Bay School? What would we ask Jude to have built and where? What would it look like? This week some of us have been writing about these things. Some of us in Tautoru have been describing our favourite play spaces and dreaming of what else we could have.

Here is some of our writing about what we enjoy:

What do we dream of? What could we ask Jude to add to our play spaces?

Next, we will publish our writing and give it to Jude. We hope that she will be inspired and we might see a rollercoaster or a rocket... you never know!

Fractions Fractions Fractions

The keen mathematicians in Scott's maths group are learning about fractions. We have been investigating the symbols for 1/2 , 1/3, and 1/4 and putting them into real life contexts.

On Tuesday we made play dough together that we will use to create pizzas, cookies, and other magical shapes to help us learn about fractions.



We used our our character strengths of team work and perseverance. We needed teamwork to help us follow the receipe and perseverance when the kneading became hard work or when mixing the ingredients.



On Wednesday we used the play dough to make meatballs and sausages. We invited friends to enjoy our dinner so needed to separate our dishes into even amounts. We even managed to divide our play dough delights into tenths !

Illustrating Music

As part of our arts focus this term we are learning how to respond to and annotate music in different ways. We have spent some time listening to different types of music and noticing the volume, speed and beat. This is helping us to notice how musicians create different layers of music.

We watched this video by the musician Len Lye

Then we used different colours and markings to add what we could hear in the music to an image... what could the volume look like, or the beat, or the speed that we can hear? We listened to some sounds and annotated them on the image. Here are some of our ideas.

We will also learn how to use the Garage Band app to explore how to compose soundscapes. 

The Power of having a buddy- Teamwork

Teamwork is described as the character strength that helps everyone contribute to the success of the team. In Tautoru we often have a learning buddy to share ideas with and to give us feedback. During maths, we can discuss different strategies we've used or think of different ways to solve a problem.

During writing, they might help us come up with ideas and better words to write or help us check our writing goals like full stops and capital letters.

" My buddy helps me to sound out new words"
" My buddy helps me to read my writing and check it makes sense"


This way we always have someone who we can share our learning journey with whether it's a challenge, a discovery or an interesting idea.

Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence

We are spending time in class unpacking the character strengths that students are not so familiar with. At the end of last term Autahi and Tautoru roamed the school and identified strengths that they
wanted to explore more.





This week we have been sharing our ideas around the character strength - Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence. The students discussed and shared their perspectives on a number of images and if they were beautiful or not. 



We agreed on terms of what a good discussion looks, sounds and feels like. The students identified that it helps to look at the person talking, to be respectful of everyone's ideas, and the importance of justifying your ideas.