New Zealand Sign Language Week

This week is a very important week for Aotearoa as it is when we celebrate and raise awareness for one of our three official languages, New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL). We use sign language as much as we can in Tautoru, practicing nine new signs every two weeks. In addition, this week we learnt to sign the alphabet and to introduce ourselves to others.

We practiced the alphabet using the posters photographed below and watching videos that showed the signs in action. After this we learnt how to say “hello, my name is…” followed by the signed letters of our names. 

It was a lot of fun learning the alphabet this week, please ask your tamariki or any Tautoru kids you see around to sign their names to you, I am sure they will love to show off what we have learnt!

Te Wā Mahi Tahi

This week was the first Te Wā Mahi Tahi that we have had inside all year! Te Wā Mahi Tahi is our designated time for tamariki to explore learning through the context of play. We put out a range of materials for students to gather, transport, construct, order and create with!

Our Tamariki loved being creative within the walls of the classroom, and our next rainy Monday definitely won't get us down! Students enjoyed using the creation table, building houses, marble runs across the classroom and testing the distance that our toy cars can travel! 

Through Te Wā Mahi Tahi students can explore their creativity, build their Leadership, Teamwork and problem solving skills. Each week we open our Te Wā Mahi Tahi sessions with a focus for the students to consider throughout the lesson, which extends their experience of the play and builds on their relationships with their peers. This week's focus was When am I at my best? Tamariki considered when they feel happiest in the classroom, and how we can bring these feelings to other areas of their learning. Here are some of the areas students said that they felt their best.

Please enjoy these photos of this week's Te Wā Mahi Tahi session!

Matisse Inspired Portraits

This week we learned about the art of Henry Matisse. He discussed how he used bold colours, clear shapes, contrast and also looked at his use of collage. This helped to inspire the background for our portraits. 

First we began by learning how to draw the proportions of a face

Then we created collage backgrounds using some of the ideas from Matisse's art works.

Lastly we added our portraits to the collage.

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!