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.

Sarah Lang Visit!

We have been so lucky today to be able to meet Sarah Laing.  Author and Cartoonist.  She demonstrated some of her cartoon drawing skills that we are now trying out in our own cartoon books. 

She talked to us about how to show different expressions on our cartoon faces.

We also had a go during the demonstration. 

Here is an example of how we have used our new skills.  

Watch this space for more exciting writing and cartoons.   

Inquiry- Using our superpowers to learn about Friendship.

How do we get to know new people? How do we learn to be good friends? What Character Strength Superpowers can help us? These are some of the questions we have been investigating.

Learning to be a good friend requires different superpowers and we have been investigating what that means. We learned that character strengths like Teamwork, Kindness, Social Intelligence and Self-Regulation are important so that we can grow our friendship circles.

We did some beautiful friendship art to show our ideas. We drew different ways that we will show our character strengths and be good friends to one another. We made friendship Koru!

Preparing our garden beds

This week we have been busy weeding and getting our garden beds filled with new crops as well as giving some TLC to some very sturdy tomatoes that have thrived in the summer heat.

First we had to do a lot of weeding and get rid of snails that love to feast on our vegies.

We then planted some more tomatoes that love the sun we get on our back court.

Finally we gave everything a good water. 

We will keep adding more seedlings over the coming days so look out for more updates. We can't wait to see how our new crop grows.

I can be your Hero! 🦸‍♀️ 🦸‍♂️

Tautoru’s inquiry focus for term one is superheroes! However, we aren’t focusing entirely on the superheroes that you see on Marvel. Instead we are learning that there is a unique hero inside every single one of us! To find this hero, we are focusing on taking care of ourselves, others and our school environment. We are also learning from superheroes, diving into their character strengths, and where they go to for help. 

This inquiry links to our school-wide writing focus, creating a Zine which we can share with the Worser Bay community and beyond! We are beginning to work on Comic Strips to create our very own superhero stories, and are learning more about magazines in general to generate inspiration.

Here are the facial expressions we have been practising to draw in our comics, as well as drawings of ourselves as superheroes, surrounded by our superhero support system!

Enjoying the Cricket 🏏 in the Sunshine ☀️

Tautoru’s PE focus for term one is ball skills. We have been practising throwing and catching with a range of ball sizes and our skills are already improving! Alongside practising our fundamental movement skills, we will be playing a range of ball games and have a trip to the ASB Centre in the works for later this term.


On Tuesday, as part of our practice, we had our friends from Cricket Wellington come and teach us the basic skills of cricket. Our tamariki practised recall speeds, throwing, bowling and batting!