111- Learning about Emergencies and First Aid

This week we had a visit from Josie who works with St John’s Ambulance. She came to share with us how we can be of help in case of emergencies. 

First we learned how to dial for help by pressing 111. Then we had to learn which services we need to ask for: fire, ambulance or police. It's important to know what kind of help we might need. Josie also mentioned that it is important that we learn our parents' cellphone numbers so please help us to practise at home.

Then we learned how to bandage people in case they have an injury. We learned how to apply the bandage and also unroll the cover slowly and carefully. We got to practise on each other so we can be confident if we ever need to do it ourselves.

We feel much more confident knowing what to do and how to dial for help! Thank you, Josie. We really appreciated your visit and sharing all the skills that our ambulance service provides.

Reading in Tautoru

Learning to read can be tricky and encompasses so many different skills. In Tautoru, we teach Reading in many different ways because of this! Children also learn differently so it's important that we provide the Tautoru students with a variety of reading opportunities and methods.

One approach to learning to read is by looking at the phonics side of it. We call these lessons Super Sounds. In these lessons, we have a specific sound we focus on. In this lesson, Ximena is teaching the digraph, 'ea'. Digraphs have two letters and one sound. We first sound out the word by looking at all the individual phonemes (sounds). For example, in mean, there are 3 phonemes (m-ea-n). After we have sounded it out, we blend the sounds together to read, 'mean'. To consolidate our learning we write silly sentences with words containing the focus sound. There are different stages to learning phonics, just like the colour wheel with some books. At times, some children have some phonics lessons on a device and then have a follow up session with the teacher after.

Another approach is guided reading sessions. Here we have small group reading sessions. These books are aimed specifically at the child's reading level where the text has many words that the child will need to sound out. We work on sounding out strategies and draw on what we have learned in the phonics lesson. The teacher guides us through the book and helps us by prompting us to think of different ways to work out the word. For example, "what's another sound that letter makes?" and "Let's reread this line to check what we read is right."

Often after our teacher session, the students have a follow up activity where we can further practise what the focus was in the guided reading session. This could be working on letter sounds, spelling rules or comprehension.

Another approach is shared reading. Here we are all reading the same text. This can be in the form of a poem or a snippet from a larger story. Poems are great to practise our phrasing and expression. We get to know the poem well because it is shorter in length. This makes it easier for us to focus on our expression as our brains aren't overloaded with trying to work out every single word. In this shared reading session, the focus was on rhyming words.

Another approach is individual silent reading time. We practise all the skills we have learned, build our fluency and work on that reading stamina.

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!