I can be your Hero! 🦸‍♀️ 🦸‍♂️

Tautoru’s inquiry focus for term one is superheroes! However, we aren’t focusing entirely on the superheroes that you see on Marvel. Instead we are learning that there is a unique hero inside every single one of us! To find this hero, we are focusing on taking care of ourselves, others and our school environment. We are also learning from superheroes, diving into their character strengths, and where they go to for help. 

This inquiry links to our school-wide writing focus, creating a Zine which we can share with the Worser Bay community and beyond! We are beginning to work on Comic Strips to create our very own superhero stories, and are learning more about magazines in general to generate inspiration.

Here are the facial expressions we have been practising to draw in our comics, as well as drawings of ourselves as superheroes, surrounded by our superhero support system!

Enjoying the Cricket 🏏 in the Sunshine ☀️

Tautoru’s PE focus for term one is ball skills. We have been practising throwing and catching with a range of ball sizes and our skills are already improving! Alongside practising our fundamental movement skills, we will be playing a range of ball games and have a trip to the ASB Centre in the works for later this term.


On Tuesday, as part of our practice, we had our friends from Cricket Wellington come and teach us the basic skills of cricket. Our tamariki practised recall speeds, throwing, bowling and batting!

Celebrating the Lunar New Year and our new beginnings

Last week we spent time getting to know our learning space and sharing fun experiences. We played games and got to know each other. One of our tasks was to create red lanterns for the Lunar New Year which is celebrated across parts of Asia and around the world. This year is the year of the tiger!

We used red paper as this symbolises vitality, celebration, good fortune, good luck and prosperity. . These lanterns will adorn Tautoru for the first few weeks. We had a lot of fun creating our decorations that also mark the beginning of our school year.

The Outdoors as our Learning Space

We are so lucky to have so many beautiful outdoor spaces around our school, so this week we took advantage of the good weather and headed to Worser Bay Beach with Autahi as well as enjoyed the outdoors at school for some sports skills.

At the beach we used our creativity and spent time building different designs. Some of us made tunnels, others dug as deeply as we could or creating complex structures using the materials around us. We found interesting creatures and different materials like sea glass, different rocks and shells. It was a lot of fun spending time discovering our outdoors with our new learning buddies.

At school we have begun our sports skills practices focusing on ball skills such as throwing, catching, and striking. These will help us with coordination, teamwork and when playing sports like floorball, netball and cricket.

Last Blog Post of 2021

 Wow! What another amazing year at Worser Bay. Here are some highlights...

And something from the staff...

The Year 6 item...

Learning about Coding- Hour of Code!

So how do computers do what they do? Technology is a new part of our learning tool kit so this week we have been exploring parts of Digital Literacy. This is all about getting to understand how digital technology works and how we can be creators of digital content. 

This week we explored block coding: using digital blocks of code to learn how images are moved around on a grid. Writing code is a lot like when we write stories. When we write stories we have to go back and check our ideas and edit our writing, while when we write code, we have to check it for 'bugs' (incorrect code). 

We used some of the block code programs in Hour of Code. This is designed for children to help them learn early coding skills.

 

Hands-on Maths Learning

 This week we have focused on Measurement during our Maths lessons. Measurement is always a great area of Maths where we can launch into learning with a hands-on approach. This sparks a lot of Positive Engagement and Positive Emotions with the children!

Some of us started by learning about measuring volume with measuring jugs. Our buddies filled the jugs up with water and then we had to use our careful looking eyes to measure how many millilitres of water there was. Water was spilled here, there, EVERYWHERE! Lucky it was just water!
The next day we started working out the difference between amounts of water in jugs. Questions were asked like "How many millilitres more is there in 'this' jug compared to 'this' jug?" "How do you know?" "What's one way you could work that out?" "What might be another strategy?" This was a great chance for us to apply some addition and subtraction strategies we have been learning about.

Others got into measuring weight and converting between grams and kilograms.

Make sure to ask your child at home what they've been doing in Maths this week!