Love of Learning

 One of the tasks on the Home Learning plan this week was around a Positive Education challenge. We challenged you to try new things by dialling up Love of Learning.

Check out what some of us got up to!

Paper Playgrounds

Paper and glue or sellotape are materials that can help stretch our creativity in wonderful ways. This week we had a paper playground challenge using some ideas from this link.

These are some of the creations we've seen so far!

Connecting Through Positive Purpose

 Part of our Positive Education curriculum is Positive Purpose: taking meaningful actions to help our community. Doing good to feel good also helps us to feel more positive as well.

This week we've been connecting with our community by making positive messages we can leave on our windows or gates. We know that by working together we can help others around us have moments of positive feeling. This character strength is called Social Intelligence: thinking about what others need and finding ways to support them. We hope you some on your walks!

Living Lockdown with Zest and Creativity

 Well... this week has looked a bit different to normal! We've made the switch to Home Learning and zoom lessons. It has been so awesome to see many of your faces on the zoom calls. It's great to have that somewhat face-to-face interaction, even if it is through a screen!

Seesaw has been flooded with Creativity, Love of Learning and of course a whole lot of zest with those Wake Up Your Brain activities!

Check out some of the things that Tautoru have been doing this week:

Ximena and I would like to take this opportunity to thank the parents and whānau once again in supporting your child with Home Learning. We know this can be challenging in a busy time when working from home. So thank you, thank you, thank you!

Remember, keep the Home Learning sessions short and sweet and remember those brain breaks to keep our brains and body fresh!

Squareness- Problem Solving

 

On Friday we worked with the Year 4 students from Māhutonga.

We are learning about the properties of a square and problem solving together. We explored the concept of “squareness.” We know that a square has 4 equal sides and 4 right angles. 

We asked: How many squares can you find that have dots from this array as their corners?

Our brains are growing!

City Gallery Visit Whakapapa- Our Stories

As  part of our Inquiry- Whakapapa: Our Stories, we visited the City Gallery. We learned about our connection to the Johnson Witehira mural ‘Ngā Kākano The Seeds’ (near Te Ngākau Civic Square) and created artworks based on our pepeha.

The City Gallery education team taught about the story behind the mural: the whakapapa of Taraika who Whāngahui-a-Tara (the great harbour of Tara- Wellington) is named after. He was a chief who descended from the great navigator Whatonga who sailed to Aotearoa in Kurahaupō Waka.

Some of us use Whānaganui-a-Tara in our pepeha as our moana (ocean) because it is our harbour too, so now we can make the connection between our story and Taraika.

After discussing how the different art elements (ideas) in the artwork, we headed to the gallery's classroom to create screen prints of our pepeha.

You can pop in to Tautoru to see all our finished art works.

It was wonderful to notice and learn about how the art around our city is connected to our personal stories. We hope we can keep spotting art all around and find new links to how art can fit into our lives.

The Gruffalo

This week we have been dialling up our Creativity to describe the Gruffalo. We revisited descriptive language such as adjectives, similes and metaphors.

Check out some of our author's work below.

Here is a read aloud of The Gruffalo story if you haven't read the book yet. We love it!