Food for plants and food for thinking

This term our Learner Attribute is I am a Thinker. This is all about solving problems, questioning, sharing ideas and making thinking visible. We used a gardening opportunity to stretch our thinking!

We will be inquiring into how plants change in different ways. To spark our curiosity we celebrated International Compost Awareness Week! At school we have a thriving composting space, so we tapped into it to help us learn about compost. We did some weeding and added the compost to get our garden beds ready for more planting.

We found lots of very interesting creatures in the compost. 

After we investigated the compost, we gathered some questions that we will use for our inquiry into how plants change. Here are some of our questions:

- How was compost invented?

- What creatures live in the compost?

- How does it feed plants?

We also wrote about our exciting morning in the garden. Here is some of our writing:

Today we put the compost on the plants in the garden beds. I saw earthworms in the compost . I saw little bugs too. When I went to the garden, Ximena showed us the compost. The compost was full of worms, apple cores, paper, little bugs and centipedes- Dhitya

Today we put compost on the plants in the garden. I found a worm. It was tiny. I put it in the planter pot. We also put some soil in the ground. We also pulled out some weeds and we saw some centipedes. and worms and a mango seed and a lavander. It smelled sweet and it was purple and some strawberries. They had yellow seeds and it was red. Leo

Making Maths Visual

How do we ‘see’ numbers? Being able to recognise patterns in numbers is called subitising. This type of mathematical problem solving lays the foundation for the development of Number Sense (the ability to manipulate numbers), and grows the understanding of how different patterns in numbers work.

Here is a group of dots. How would you add them together? Which different ways can they be grouped so that we can count them? 

Were you drawn to fives or twos first? What other groups did you see?

Exploring how to group numbers in different ways helps us to develop understanding of patterns within numbers as well as extend our ideas and grow our thinking by describing the many strategies we've used. It is also fantastic, creative mathematical fun!

This week we had a go at finding multiple ways to work out how many dots we saw in a pattern. We had rich mathematical conversations about different strategies we used.

If you would like to learn more about subitising and how to use it at home, here is a link.

Developing Grit and Resilience Strategies

This term we’ve been inquiring into what is Grit and what strategies we can use to get us through challenges both in learning and with other people. This Grit Toolkit will grow over time and help us to take on new challenges with confidence.

Sometimes challenges might make us feel frustrated so we can practice breathing, going to nature outside or drawing to calm us down. We can also use positive self-talk and tell ourselves positive things so we persevere. We can also find someone we can tell our feelings to.

Sometimes the challenges can be about how we communicate with other people. We have been learning about how we can talk about what is bothering us, ask for help if we need it and use good teamwork skills to help each other succeed!

Baking Cupcakes 🧁

This week we thought it would be a great idea to utilise cooking in our writing and maths practice. We did this through baking cupcakes! Measurement and and fraction techniques were used whilst baking the cupcakes, and then students wrote about the experience of baking.

The best part about this was that the students all then got to enjoy the delicious cupcakes they worked so hard on!

Te Reo Māori

Our Te Reo lessons have been a true highlight recently! This week we revisited our work on the numbers in Māori, introducing ourselves, the person next to us, and our parents. 

We have utilised fun games to help us in our learning, for example we would spread ourselves around the classroom, and on a clap have to find the person closest to us, tell them our name and the names of our parents. We would then introduce the person next to us to the rest of the class.

What am I? Using details in writing to give clues

 How do we describe an animal in detail by giving lots of clues? We have been writing 'What am I?' descriptions of some animals we know and sharing them with each other. This has given us an opportunity to describe an animal while thinking about what information our audience needs to have.

 Here are some examples of our writing. Can you guess which animal it is?

My secret animal is light blue and lives in the sea. It is as big as a house. It eats plankton and is my second favourite animal.

My secret animal it has flippers and a long tail. Its teeth are scary and sharp. By Otis

How do superheroes tackle challenges? They use Grit!

In Tautoru, we have been inquiring into the characteristics of superheroes this term. We know that they help people and sometimes they have superpowers. But they are also faced with challenges to overcome. You will have seen our focus on learning about and developing Grit across the school this year and the question we have been focusing on is: How do superheroes use grit? How might we use it for our challenges, too?

We started by thinking about what is a challenge for us. Everyone had lots of different ideas, which means that sometimes challenges can be very personal and different for each of us.

To learn about how we can develop grit we have tried sketching. This is a big challenged because it's all about making mistakes and keep practising. We spend time sketching shells inside and sketching outside. We had t focus on detail and draw different types of lines.

Now we are preparing some superhero comics and that will show how we can use grit to overcome challenges in different situations.