Fitness Frenzy!

This term our Inquiry has centered around the power of our bodies. We now understand heaps about what and how our body systems work and have shared lots of information on how we can keep our body and mind healthy. 

This week our challenge was to create a fitness routine that would strengthen our entire body! In our groups we came up with all sorts of exercises and routines to get our hearts pumping, our bodies moving and our muscles working! Some of the routines we came up with were made up of exercises specific to gymnastics, parkour, tennis and taekwondo.

As of late we have been focusing on the "celebration" part of the Inquiry cycle. We have become much more confident in finding different ways to share and celebrate our new knowledge. We have also been talking a lot about "Taking Action". These routines do just that!

Today we shared our routine to another group and used the rubrics/success criteria below to give each other feedback about each routine. We really enjoyed giving feedback to each other and agreed on our next steps.

Character Day with Wanwan and Gabrielle's whanau group

 Today we got into whanau groups to learn some more about character strengths. We created some plays showing different character strengths and others watching gave us feedback and told us what character strengths our plays had. Humour was a strength of everyone - come to assembly on Friday for an example.

We also watched this video about two frogs... can you work out what character strengths they were using?



Then, like the frogs, we also made butter from cream. Ask us how! Some groups used real perseverance because they were trying and trying with milk instead of cream!!

Lastly we made up our own games especially focused on one or two of the character strengths. It was a fin day together.


Character day.
Today was character day and we did all sorts of fun activities in our whanau group which in case you don't know is a group with our siblings and some people from a Autahi, tautoru, mahutonga and matariki. My whanau group made butter from cream and we made up our own games and demonstrated how to play the games we made up and the last thing we did was make up our own plays.
By Nela

today was really fun we got jars fulled of cream all of us shakes the jars into butter. I loved it when one-one gone and PRANKED US!!! filling some of the jars with milk instead of cream it was cool and annoying we did this in groups of course my group was one of the pranked groups!
By Ruby

today we had whanau day and we got into our groups and what we did was we made cream and also ate it, we made our own games and we played splash.I learnt that it is really hard to make up your own games.
By Cruz

Character Day - Gillian and Susie's Base Groups

Today we got together in our Whanau Groups to spend most of our day exploring and using our Character Strenghts.

Gillian and Susie's Whanau Groups started the morning off sharing the story "Beautiful Oops". This book was all about turning mistakes into something beautiful using the stregth of creativity.

We used all sorts of material to create "mistakes" and turn them into something awesome. We added all of our creations to a collaborative mural.

Experimenting with dye. We used straws to blow the dye into different patterns, shapes and objects.

We used watercolours and turned torn newspaper into animals, volcanoes and many other things.

We folded card and origami paper and used the folds to create lots of different art pieces.

Some of us tried this Imagination "Warm Up" where we had to use our creativity to turn random lines, squiggles and marks into other things.

We used circles, holes and other craft scraps to create pictures and mini stories.

And here is the final product...our collaborative mural celebrating all of our creative "mistakes".

After morning tea our group listened to the story "The Most Magnificent Thing" which was all about perspective. After unpacking what perspective actually is we worked in groups to create a movie showing people when, how and why they could use this character strength (you can find these on Seesaw).

Positive Accomplishment in Tautoru!

Over the last week Tautoru has been a hive of activity as we have been diving into Student Led Conferences and sharing our wonderful learning and achievements with our whanau.

It was great to see the children leading their parents in conversations around their learning, discussing their goals and showing their whanau many of the things we do at school. The teachers and parents were so impressed with the leadership that we saw!

We enjoyed teaching our parents some Te Reo.

We spent some time reading and sharing stories that we had written.

Lots of us enjoyed creating an obstacle course to challenge our parents!

It was nice to teach our parents some Rainbow Breathing, we enjoy breathing exercises after a busy lunch.

Here are some comments from our children about SLCs:

"It was good because I enjoyed the feedback that my mum and dad gave me about my goals".

"It was fun because Dad doesn’t often get to see what I do at school. He was impressed".

"So great! I had fun with mum making and doing a tricky obstacle course".





"I enjoyed teaching mum the rainbow breathing that we do at school and I was proud of the goals I am working on". 

"Dad came to see me at school for SLC's it was really nice because he doesn't get to come and see what I do very much".

"I liked playing tennis with mum and dad, it was a challenge on the Scavenger Hunt".

"It was so cool to have mum and dad stay at school with me so that I could teach them rainbow breathing. It was fun".





"I loved showing mum the work I have been doing because she said she was very proud".

Nic and Scott's Whanau Group: Character Day 2017- Our Movies

Te Reo Maori

Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori



We have been celebrating Maori Language week ....  all year!

Here are some videos of the students asking each other how they are feeling. It is has been great to see the students confidence growing when speaking in Te Reo.

Use the information below to practice with your children at home.

No Toy Swap at the Disco

Hello!

We have decided that we are going to save the TOY SWAP for a different event in the year.
This is so we can enjoy all the other things that our beautiful Worser Bay Disco has - like the epic dress up theme!!!

Come along in your best 80's costume!

How different are animals to humans?

The Plasma literacy group are working on their own mini inquiries.

They have selected a number of animals to investigate. Our inquiry into the power of our own bodies has inspired this reading group to inquire about animals.

The cat team is investigating the following questions.

Are cats intestines different to ours?

How long does it take for them to digest food?

"Coco has found out that a female cat is either called a Molly or a queen."

"Emily research led her to the fact that all male cats are called Toms."

We also have a team investigating Gorilla. They are keen to find out the following.

Do they have the same number of bones?

How much bigger are gorillas to humans.

Nuala is interested in sharks. "An interesting fact about sharks is that they are partially warm blooded!"

The shark team is also interested in what a shark brain looks like.

There is also a humming bird team that is interested in the following questions.

Why can they fly backwards and upside down?

What is a hummingbird?

Maths

We have had fun creating our own problem solving examples. See if you can work out some of these:

There were 3 chickens. Each chicken laid 36 eggs. How many eggs were laid in total?

If there were 55 robbers and 11 jails how many robbers would share a jail?

A visit from Marco and Sam from Scots College

We had a visit from two boys from Scots College today.



Marco and Sam have spent the year researching the issue of rubbish in our environment and, in particular, our ocean environment.



As part of their own inquiry they have organised a Beach Clean Up Day.

If you are interested head down to the Seatoun Wharf this Saturday at 10 am and join other people in the community cleaning the beach of rubbish.

Inquiry

What do we need to do to make our bodies healthy?

We chose our own groups to work with, did a brainstorm of what we already thought our bodies needed to be healthy, wrote some questions and now we are researching to find out the answers.

The next step in our Inquiry is to sort our information and create a way to share it. 

We are hoping to convince others about what they need to do to be healthy. 

Ask us.....we will tell you what YOU need to do!

Arrays

We have been making our own creative arrays!

We think it was the Olympics training day.

On Tuesday we had a day to grow our muscles and use our growth mindset.

This is part of our Inquiry to experience being active and ways to make our body stronger.

Here are some comments from Tautoru:

Nye: It was super because of all the new sports we learnt!

Cameron: It was fantastic because I got to learn how to play floorball.

Otto: It was unbelievable because we get to do so many cool sports.

Zac: I cried because I tripped over a hockey stick and landed on my face, but I got up.

Scott: I found tip-tapping in futsal difficult because I kept tapping it too hard. It’s a skill!  

Cooper and Coco: I learnt that a futsal ball and a football is different, futsal balls are heavier because of the the futsal court is smaller and it doesn’t need to go as far.