Our Arts Celebration

 Worser Bay School have been getting their hands and paint brushes dirty in preparation for the Arts Celebration... and it's finally here!

Tuesday and Wednesday night went off with a bang! It was so great to see whānau and friends on the night to celebrate all the hard work the students have put in.

On Wednesday morning, the kids at school did a Gallery Walk to look and admire the artwork across the school. We practised our Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence with our EYES ONLY. In saying that, we definitely had to practise our Social Intelligence, Judgment and Self Regulation.

After our Gallery Walk, we came back into Tautoru to write about what we noticed, admired and thought was interesting.

Here are a few snapshots from the Gallery Walk and writing.

Netball and Passing Skills

 This week we were lucky enough to have Netball Wellington in to teach Years 0-4 how to play Netball. We enjoyed it so much that this we have been practising our Netball and passing skills in PE time.

Next term, Netball starts back up again and we need more players for the Year 1-2 team! Let us know if you are keen so we can make a team!

In our PE session, we started with how to chest pass correctly. Then we got into a modified Netball game. Check us out in action below!

We have mail!

Earlier in the year, waayyyyyyy back in the start of March, we did lots of learning about the Mars Rover named Perseverance. We wrote descriptions about the rover, we wrote descriptions of Mars, we wrote about how it landed on Mars and we wrote reports on what happened pretending to be news reporters. You name it, we wrote about it!

Towards the end of our learning, we wrote letters to NASA to ask questions.

This week we received an exciting letter in the mailbox. It was addressed from NASA. As soon as the bell went and we had done the roll on Monday morning, we cracked open the letter. NASA thanked us for the letters, gave us some amazing badges from some of the space missions as well as some very inspirational thoughts. They reminded us that amongst the tamariki in Tautoru there may be, one day not too far away, someone who will be able to visit space.

This shows us how powerful our voice and our writing can be! We can communicate with people that work at NASA and find out new information!

Keeping the beat!

This week we have composed a beat using percussion to share at our Art Celebration next week. We revisited some of the learning we did last term and used different percussion instruments to create a short rhythmic piece.

We combined our ideas and practised together. Some of us took the role of conductors to help everyone follow the score. Some of the things that helped our teams to be successful were:

- Listening to each other's ideas and combining them.

- Saying positive comments to encourage each other to practise and keep going.

- Staying focused and practice a lot.

We look forward to sharing our learning process with you next week!

Mihi- Tōku Whānau

 We have been extending our Te Reo by adding to our Mihi (short introduction) by stretching our knowledge of vocabulary to add our grandparents, our tīpuna. Now we can introduce our parents, grandparents and ourselves in te Reo Māori. Next we will add brothers and sister or cousins.

This is the structure we have been using for 3 or more grandparents:

Ko ___________, ko______________, ko _________ rātou ko ____________ ōku tīpuna.

This is for two grandparents:

Ko ______ rāua ko _________ ōku tīpuna.

Our Stories- Arts Celebration

 We have begun to get ready for our Art Celebration by exploring how to use paint and brushing techniques. We have been learning how to mix colours and add contrast to make shapes stand out. Painting is different to other drawings that we are used to as we need to plan the background and foreground first instead of colouring it in after. 

We started by thinking about what colours we could use for the background and used big brushes. Then we added the details with smaller brushes. We have been experimenting with how to add colour to highlight shapes in the small detail. As well as using creativity we need to really plan our ideas. Next we will begin to create our art works for the Arts Celebration. 

Gratitude

 We are so grateful to be back at school! 

While we've been at home doing Home Learning, students have been busy getting stuck into their learning and so have the teachers! We did extra reading all around Positive Education. Specifically, the flourish model and it's domains; Positive Emotions, Positive Purpose, Positive Health, Positive Relationships, Positive Accomplishment and Positive Engagement.

Some key learning from this has been around the wellbeing strategies of Savouring and Gratitude.

Fredrickson's broaden and build theory explains the importance of positive emotions on our mental, physical and social wellbeing. There are two components to this theory. 

Broaden: Positive emotions broaden our attention. 

Build: This broadened attention on positivity leads to increased engagement with our environment around us and increase in positive resources.

If we look for the positive, we can find the positive.

From here, the teachers at Worser Bay School put their heads together to come up with a plan of reintegrating the Worser Bay community back into 'face-to-face' teaching and learning with a focus on Positive Engagement, Positive Relationships and Positive Emotions.

On Thursday, Tautoru focused on Gratitude. We started by watching a video about the science behind Gratitude and a short animated clip about how Gratitude effects us emotionally.

Then, we made our own Gratitude letters to practise showing gratefulness. Check some of them out here.