Oh! Look, a boat! Launching our books - and boats.

Picture books are a great source of inspiration to us. 'Oh! Look, a Boat!' by Andrew J. Ross is our latest favourite. A little red boat floats up the river and past mouse's house. When mouse hops onboard, he finds himself sailing away on a big adventure. The story has so many great connections to our watery inquiry and is great fun to read because it has lots of opportunities to say 'Oh! Look, a Boat!' along with all the creatures that see the red boat bobbing along.

We were inspired! 

Step by step, we wrote our stories, deciding where else our little boats could go and practising our storytelling voices. We each designed a character for the story, to sit in the boat and sail through the book. Finally, we imagined what different characters in our story would say when they saw the red boat, and added some speech bubbles.

This was an opportunity for our Autahi writers to work on a sustained piece of storytelling, adding to it over multiple days, with an audience in mind. 

Here is a taste of our awesome stories. There will be more to see in the upcoming issue of Te Wheke (our school zine) and at our Arts Celebration.

Getting close to 100 days

 

Part of our Maths programme contains a daily check in with the class calendar. The Maths curriculum contains lots of learning about days of the week, names of months and counting forwards to and backwards from 20.

Each day we count forward to the date from the day before and then predict what the next number will be. We use clues based on the order that numbers follow to support us in doing this.

One of the highlights is counting the number of days we have had so far at school. The early days aren't to difficult but as the year goes on we get into some much bigger numbers.

As we reach a ten we group it together to show how many groups of ten and extra ones we have gone past.

Now that we are getting close to 100 days at school it's time for a celebration. Next Thursday the 24th of July will be our 100th day of school for 2025.

To celebrate we will be having a stay and play to connect our whanau with our new Rising 5's whanau and celebrate lots of learning and fun. See the school newsletter for more info.

Celebrating Term 2

 

Contexts for learning

 Over the past few weeks in Autahi we have been connecting some of our learning to the upcoming Matariki celebrations. In this blog we will explore some of the things we have been doing around the classroom to use this context for our learning.

Our Oral Narrative (check out this great blog to learn more about Oral Narrative) this week is connected with different stories about Matariki. We have been reading and unpacking 'The Seven Kites of Matariki' and using it to connect with other stories. 

Flit the Fantail provided us with the inspiration to explore leaf rubbings to capture a Kawakawa leaf. We then added the Pleiades star cluster on them so that they can be used to spot the Matariki stars in the early morning.

Matariki is about celebrating with friends and family, so we added these beautiful leaves into cards for some special people in our lives. It was also a good chance to practise the features of a card like writing who it is to and from.

Connecting our culture to our learning is important too and we have been learning about similar celebrations all around the world. Both connecting with the stars and the idea of a New Year.  

Finally we haver been writing about Matariki while we practise writing 1-2 quality sentences. Each of the Matariki stars represents something and each provides lots of great oral language and themes for writing. Waitī and Waitā connect with our inquiry as the stars that represent fresh and salt water. 

Mānawatia a Matariki! We hope you all have time to connect with your friends and family this Matariki holiday and look forward to continuing our learning next week!

What makes a good friend?

 We have been exploring the topic of friendship as part of our Positive Education programme this term.

The beginning of a school journey is full of new people and new opportunities to make friends. We hope that these lead to life long connections with each other. But how do we help to foster the pro social behaviours that lead to strong connections with each other? 

Here are some of the things we have been up to:

We collected our ideas about what we think a good friend looks and sounds like.

Our poster is up in our play area so we can check in on it if we get stuck.

We share with our friends and use teamwork.

We can read a book together.

We can draw together.

We can build together.

Autahi are on a journey to be the best friends that we can be!

Ngā Tohu o te Taiao (The Signs of Nature)

This week, we have had the excitement of a trip to the NZSO schools' concert, Ngā Tohu o te Taiao.

Building up to our trip, we did quite a bit of learning about some of the instruments in the orchestra that we would be hearing play. This included a live, interactive Zoom with the NZSO's Animateur, Chris Lam Sam and also a couple of musicians from the orchestra.

And, as an extra bonus, we welcomed Kiri earlier this week. We are grateful to Kiri for sharing her musical expertise. She helped us to learn a waiata to sing with the orchestra, and also introduced one of the pieces we heard at the concert: Morning Mood from Grieg's Peer Gynt. He tino ataahua te puoro!

NZSO put together a beautiful programme of music relating to the natural world. Experiencing a live orchestra is always a feast for the senses: there is so much to see as well as to hear, and it is thrilling to be in the same room as an orchestra when it is playing to full effect. Everything vibrates with sound!

Along with the orchestra, we also got to see Marcus Winter, a.k.a. 'The Sandman', weave his magic. We got to hear come specially-composed music, telling the story of the tohu (signs) in nature that reveal the changing seasons. Marcus accompanied the music with some stunning, live visual art and taonga puoro. 

It was pretty exciting to share all of this with the other local schools who packed out the auditorium. A highlight was when the whole audience perform the song we had all been learning together, accompanied by the orchestra.

Visitors bringing new learning and trips out of school are such an important part of our rich programme. We've come back to school with wonderful memories of what we saw and heard, and heaps of inspiration for our own creative exploration, storytelling and musical adventures.

Hearing and recording sounds

 One of the key skills for writing is the ability to hear each of the sounds within a word and record them to write it. 

As adults you might hear yourself sounding out a word like 'supermarket' when writing it down. We are tapping into our phonemic knowledge and accessing spelling patterns that we might know that give us the sounds we need.

As children are learning to write they use alphabet cards to support this process. We use the prompt of 'What can you hear?' followed by 'Now which letter makes that sound?' to help learners go through the process of sounding out words.

A word like cat has three individual sounds. As you make each sound you record the corresponding letter. In the example above a learner has listened for the 4 sounds in the word pink and recorded each sound in a box. The boxes can help support the writer to be sure of how many sounds they need. 

Here we can see some great attempts at the words mucked and about. In the word mucked they have recorded the dominant sounds they can hear and when they have learned the spelling pattern for using an -ed at the end of a word they will successfully be able to spell the word without support. 

The ou sound comes up later in the structured literacy programme yet we can give learners a heads up what they might expect in future learning and praise the effort for trying a tricky sound.

This is just one of the skills we use for writing. It takes lots of practice and the next time you need to spell out a word, ask your learner to help or model how you do it with them. Seeing adults as learners to will blow their minds!