Writers Wall

We have set up two spaces in Tautoru to display student writing. It is important for students to see themselves as writers and one way for them to do this is through displaying their work in the classroom. Writing for an audience is an important aspect of the writing process and we encourage whanau to pop in and spend some time reading with your children. 

The writers wall gives students an opportunity to publish a piece of writing. Publishing is not something we do a lot of but it helps to develop handwriting skills as students are asked to focus on writing their letters with the correct shape and size. Writing for an audience is an important aspect of the writing process and we encourage whanau to pop in and spend some time reading with your children. 

The writers wall also gives students an insight into what writing looks like across Tautoru. We often use student writing as a model and having their work on display is a great motivator for all of our students in the space.

We will continue to add new pieces of writing over the year so keep your eyes and ears glued to this space!

Growth Mindset Strategies

 Our Positive Education programme continues to thrive in Tautoru. As you may have noticed from previous blog posts, this term we have a focus on The Learning Pit and how we can use Growth Mindset strategies to help us move out of the pit. Read this blog post to find out more about The Learning Pit.

This term, we have learnt about the difference between a Growth Mindset and a Fixed Mindset. This is a cool video that explores Growth Mindset.

The Growth Mindset strategies we are learning:

• Breathing techniques
• Positive Self Talk
• Savouring the Moment

We are well and truly masters of different breathing techniques to help us move out of The Learning Pit from the 2 or 3 years of practice at Worser Bay School! Some of these are 5 finger breathing, shark fin breathing and belly breathing.

We can use positive self talk to help us use a growth mindset when we are in The Learning Pit.

This week we have been focusing on a new Growth Mindset called Savouring the Moment! Check out these videos and photos of us savouring a special moment. This makes us focus on the positive rather than on the negative. Our brain is wired to focus on the negative so we have to consciously make sure we velcro those positives into our minds!

Here we are writing about a moment in the past that made us happy. This is one way we can savour the moment! We could also close our eyes and think about what happened in that moment and how it made us feel.

Exploring Sculptures and using a Growth Mindset- City Gallery Visit

We went to visit the City Gallery to practice being in the Learning Pit!  This week we tackled how to create endomorphic sculptures. These are sculptures that can have open ended meanings and are created by what we see in our environment. 

First we see took a sculpture tour and visited some of the sculptures around the waterfront. We learned about how different artists have used materials, elements and the environment to create their sculptures. Claire and Helen shared all their amazing knowledge to help us learn more about this outdoor art gallery.

Then we learned about endomorphic shapes and how we can use our creativity to form shapes that have volume. We used lots of positive self-talk to help us persevere when creating something so open ended because we didn't know how our shape would look like when we started. 

We told Claire, one of our art teachers, about the Learning Pit and she said she will definitely used that when she does her art as she sometimes gets a bit frustrated, too!

We are really looking forward to going back to the gallery to learn more and keep challenging ourselves in different ways.

Beat, Rhythm, Pitch and Texture

 

These young Jedi are using their lightsabers to defeat Darth Vader by taping to the beat of the Imperial March.  We had to listen carefully to the beat and changed the pace when necessary. 

The beat is the 'clock' of music. It always stays constant and never changes. While listening to different songs we could spot when the beat got faster or slower. Our next challenge is to create our own patterns that other teams can copy or add on. We could have an assembly piece on the horizon so keep an eye out!

We are also going to investigate our musicians use texture to create a mood in music and how this mood can make us feel lots of different emotions.

Super Sounds - Phonics and Spelling

 Each week we regularly start our reading sessions with Super Sounds. This is where students learn about different phonemes (sounds), digraphs (two letters to make one sound, e.g. ll in in still or 'kn' in knit), and trigraphs (three letters to make one sounds, e.g. tch in witch). We usually focus on one phoneme each week. This is one part of our literacy programme. After our super sound sessions, we move into other literacy learning such as guided reading sessions with the teacher and shared reading activities.

In Super Sounds, we practise blending and segmenting words, 'roboting' the words. This is where students sound out the word on the card and then put it back together. This practice really helps students to identify the individual sounds in words which also helps when they are reading books. When we come across words we're not sure of at home, you could by 'roboting' the word to try work it out!

After we have practised blending and segmenting the words. We do a quick fire round by reading the words without sounding them out.

Next, we practise writing some words that have the phoneme of the week in it and then write a silly sentence using some of those words. This is a great time for us to also focus on our letter formation! Win, win!

After we have learnt about lots of different phonemes, digraphs and trigraphs, we move onto spelling patterns and spelling rules. We might learn about the spelling rules including 'ed' and 'ing' such as when to double the consonant when adding 'ed' or 'ing' or when we should drop the 'e' when adding 'ed' or 'ing'. There are many spelling rules in the English language!

Developing our Artist Eyes

 We have continued to practise our observation and sketching skills. We know that when learning something new mistakes are normal, so sketching is helping to notice our mistakes and use them to learn. We are practising being in The Learning Pit and persevering so we can see our artist eyes grow over time.

This week we have been sketching shells, leaves, seed pods and pine cones.

The sketching skills we have been practising are:

- Holding the pencil higher up than we would for writing. This helps us to draw the first lines lightly.

- Focusing on using lines we like to define our shape.

- Shading parts to add depth to the lines.

The Learning Pit

What is the Learning Pit? We all go through it when we learn something new! 

Today, we first learnt about the learning pit by learning about a finger movement pattern. Ximena showed us how to do it. We were in the first stage of the learning pit where we wanted to learn something new.

Then we were in the learning pit, at the bottom of the picture. We were feeling a little fuzzy and unsure.

We kept practising and practising. We were now coming up out the pit. 

To practise our new learning about The Learning Pit, we used positive self talk such as "I can do it" and "I'll keep trying" when we were sketching trees.