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.

Celebrating Sea Week!

 We celebrated Sea Week by sharing some of the things we love about the sea. We brought special sea treasures and books from home to share, and used our discovery space to spark our imagination. Sea Week has given us lots of opportunities to extend our learning!

We spent time sketching shells, paying close attention to the lines we could see.

                                                     

We also read Celia the Seagull, by Nicole Miller,  and learned about the problems that pollution is causing to the sea creatures. This story gave us more ideas to add to our writing. 

We wrote about the different animals we love and how the sea is special to us. We wrote about the sea throughout the week, aiming to describe our ideas using conjunctions (and, so, then, because, if, but) to make our sentences longer. Here are a few examples.