We give things a try!

 Last week we kept the school open later than usual to host our parent community in some Positive Education workshops. You can find a link to all the presentations here. Positive Education Workshops

The children in Autahi were excited about their whanau coming into school to do some learning and wrote some invitations.

A lot of the learning that happens in the first year at school is being experienced for the first time and this means we are constantly asking learners to give things a try. This can be anything from letter formation to strategies for adding to throwing and catching a ball. 

So alongside all this learning we have to balance this with learning about how we can manage these new challenges and have some fun while we are doing it.

The Autahi learners off to give things a try!

In our classroom you might hear the phrase "Mistakes help your brain grow" or "At school we give things a try". These handy phrases help us to see new things as something we can give a go and start on a pathway to learning. 

Research shows that pushing ourselves to experience new things is great for our brains. New learning involves a process of giving things a go and then practicing that learning to form pathways in our brains. The more we practise, the stronger that pathway becomes. 

Below are some mini challenges that you could try. You never know what you might discover when you try new things!

• Try sitting in a different place at home or in the office.

• Take a different route to a familiar place.

• Brush your teeth with the hand you don’t usually use.

• Try listening to a different genre of music.

• Give a new food a try.

The Great Autahi Handwriting Challenge!

Last week, Tautoru's Blog post focussed on handwriting: click through this link to read it. It includes a handy overview of how handwriting develops as children progress through the school. 

Along with a number of local schools, we are participating in The Great New Zealand Handwriting Challenge. In all of our classrooms, you will find us engaged in quality handwriting practice for at least ten minutes a day. This is time well spent: being able to write comfortably, clearly and at pace is essential for so many areas of learning. There are also proven benefits to both reading and spelling from learning to write letters correctly and consistently.

It will be no surprise to learn that, in Autahi, we invest a lot of time in letter formation. Our students are in the process of learning and embedding phonics knowledge that will be the foundation of their literacy. As they learn letter names and sounds, they also learn how to write them. This is vital: neuroscience tells us that decoding (reading) and encoding (writing) are intimately connected in our brains, supporting each other.

Learning to hold a pencil correctly in a tripod grip can be a challenge. Using shaped pencil grips or three-sided pencils can be helpful.

Holding a writing implement correctly and controlling it to make accurate letter shapes takes a surprising amount of physical strength and coordination. Most of our writing is done at a desk, encouraging correct posture and book orientation. It takes core strength to sit and remain stable while writing. More than this, our children have to develop many small muscles in their hands to enable them to control a pencil and provide the right amount of weight to their pencil strokes (not too light and not too hard, either). 

We find that drawing is a great way to build writing stamina. But many children also benefit from writing with chalks outdoors, painting, manipulating Lego and puzzle pieces, using tweezers and threading beads. 

All of these activities recruit muscle strength and fine motor control. We have also seen some success in a 'big to small approach': encouraging students to make letter shapes on large paper or on our outdoor chalk boards. Then, gradually reducing the size bit by bit, to fit the page of a book as the child's motor control develops.

 

In an apparent return to a bygone age, we have recently begun to experiment with using small sticks of chalk and chalkboards for our beginner writers. This suggestion comes from Dr Helen Walls, one of the brains behind The Great New Zealand Handwriting Challenge.

The chalk can only be held with a tripod grip while the sensation of the chalk on the board gives more sensation and 'feedback' than a whiteboard or paper. This helps to embed the movements needed to make the shapes and also tells the writer if they are pressing too hard: the chalk will break.

As our writers begin to produce their letter shapes more smoothly, they progress practising handwriting in books. They refine the size, position and orientation of their letters. We learn letter shapes in groups according to similar movements: for example, c, a, d, g, s and e all use an 'open mouth' letter c shape. We use consistent language to describe the shapes and encourage children to say what they're doing as they write. An added benefit of this is that it gives us a common language (used school-wide) to talk about the moves and shapes we're using when forming our letters.

 

There is a lot to absorb here, but it is a gradual process. A little and often works best. And handwriting can be quite peaceful and mediative. It is often a little oasis of calm in our day that we all enjoy!

 

Finally, let's not lose sight of why we're putting in all this effort. Having beautiful handwriting is not an end in itself: our aim is to equip our students with the foundational skills needed to create and communicate with confidence. When children can form letters and words with ease and fluency, their writing can truly take flight.

Peck Peck Peck: how we use quality picture books as a springboard for learning.

 

In Autahi, we love picture books and we read plenty of them. But each week, we have an extra-special picture book that is a focus for our Literacy learning and is often connected to our Inquiry themes, or other areas of our curriculum.

We read our special book daily, taking time to learn about new and interesting words (building our vocabulary), characters, settings and also interesting language features such as rhyme or descriptive language. This is part of the Better Start Literacy Approach, which is the cornerstone of our literacy programme in the Junior school.

We also like to find books with interesting themes to get us thinking and talking. 

This week, we have been reading 'Peck Peck Peck' by Lucy Cousins.

This colourful book is about the adventures of a young woodpecker who is learning how to peck. Like our Autahi students, the little woodpecker is an explorer of the world. While we use our eyes, fingers, noses and ears to find out about our world, he uses his beak: peck, peck, peck. The book is made extra-fun by the many holes stamped through the pages, showing where the little woodpecker has been pecking away - and giving glimpses of what might be lurking on the next page.

The little woodpecker shows plenty of Perseverance and Zest as he learns all about pecking by trying it out in lots of different places.

We have been inspired to be explorers, just like the little woodpecker. With our yellow origami beaks, we have peck, peck, pecked our way around our classroom and the playground. 

This has been a rich source of ideas for our writing. In Autahi, writing one good sentence is a key goal. If you can write one good sentence, you can go on to write many, but you have to have the foundational skills to do this in place first. Our students are working hard on tricky transcription skills, such as letter formation, pencil control, phonemic (sound) awareness and spelling. We try to lighten their cognitive load by providing fun sentence starters. In this case, the sentence starter came straight from our picture book and we wrote 'I peck the...' sentences. 

After our pecking exploration of our environment, we were not short of ideas to share with each other, and then try writing. Pop into Autahi to see our finished sentences on display. 

Zones of Regulation

 

With our Positive Education parent evening coming up fast (6.30pm on the 19th of March, mark your calendars!) we thought it would be well timed to dive into some aspects of our programme to shed some light around and whet the appetite for more Pos Ed learning.

During each and every day we will experience a range of emotions. The rage you feel when someone cuts you off in traffic on the way to work. The despair when you realise you left your lunch at home on the counter and it's too late to go back for it. The joy when your colleague says they have too much of their delicious pasta and would you like some.

Maybe thats just me.

This range of emotions will always be there and learning ways to navigate those emotions and return ourselves to a calmer state is a useful tool in our emotional regulation. The earlier we start to learn about the ways we can regulate these emotions, the more equipped we will be for future difficulties.

Each of the four zones above represents a grouping of similar emotions that helps us to better identify which zone we might find ourselves or see others in.

In the classroom we learn that our best learning happens when we are in the green zone. Being calm helps us to process information and get ourselves into the flow of what we are doing.

Finding what helps you get back into the green zone can be as simple as trying some breathing exercises. Or it can be listening to metal cranked right up in your headphones as you cook dinner. Again that one could just be me.

Only you are the expert. When you feel sad sometimes you just need a hug from a loved one to get you back into the green zone. When you feel excited you may need to run to let out that extra energy and bring you back to a calmer state.

Some of the langauge we use at school includes:

• I can see you are feeling __________. What could you do to get back into your green zone?
  
  
• I'm noticing you seem to be in the blue zone, I know that you like to do __________ to get back to the green zone.

Over the coming weeks, we will make our own plans on how we get back to the green zone and share these with you.

My challenge to you is to really think about what works for you when you are trying to change your zone.

Ice, ice, Autahi

 

This week, we became explorers of ice! Luckily, we don't need to go to Antarctica to get up close to the cold stuff. Instead, we set our Autahi students a challenge. Each was given some ice cubes in a plastic bag. Could they find a way to transform the ice into water?

Autahi students are a creative bunch. Would you have thought of using sunshine?

Tap water (which is a little warmer than the ice)?

The hand dryer in the bathrooms?

Our Strength of Creativity shone through when we came to write about ice, too. Our 'Hey, ice' writing this week gave our students a chance to show what they know and have observed about ice. 

Drawing on our students' direct experiences and knowledge often sparks some of their best writing. If they know what they want to say, a picture plan can be a useful way to capture their ideas. This helps them to formulate and say a sentence. Then, we can help them to use their growing letter and sound knowledge to write some or all of the letters and words they need.