Exploring Our Character Strengths--Gratitude

A big part of Positive Education is looking at our character strengths and working from a strengths perspective.  Just like anything else, we can grow our strengths by practising.  We have been exploring and practising Gratitude in the last few weeks.

We have been reading this book called, An Awesome Book of Thanks, and we wrote our own version.

We worked together to write this shared piece of writing.

We read this story and then wrote our own pages too. 
We thought about all that we have and are thankful for.  We realised that we are really lucky and we have a lot! 




Here are some of our pages!

We also shared some things with the class that we were thankful for.


I am thankful for holidays away with my family to a castle!


I am thankful for flying fish presents from my mum and sister!

Literacy and Play

For the last few weeks we have been reading stories using direction words like up, down, out, and around.  Last week we read the story "Going Out," about two little mice who sneak out of their hole and make their way through the house to find some food.  

After reading the story we all made our own little mice and then started creating obstacle courses for our mice, using boxes and card, describing how the mice moved through them.

We made our mice out of pipe cleaners, googlie eyes and pom poms.

All week you could hear the kids buzzing talking about look at my mouse, it's going under the bridge and over the ramp and then through the tunnel.  

We wrote about it practising using our direction words and we put the words from the story back in order in our books.  

There was so much learning going on and lots of excitement around our creations!

Observational Insect Drawings

Thinking about our inquiry of being forest protectors we have been discussing different insects that we know and have been practising our observational skills by looking closely at their shapes and drawing what we can see.  Scientists have to look closely and really notice things.  

 We chose insects and drew them looking at the different shapes.  Then we used small detail paint brushes and we carefully painted in the colours we could see in our insects.  

We concentrated really hard and this small detail work is really good fine motor control practise as well.

 After we had drawn our insects and painted them we had to use black sharpie to go back over the outline and add in any details that had gotten lost.  This also took lots of concentration and really made our pictures stand out.

Finally we cut out the insects and put them on black card.  They look so beautiful and you can see lots of the shapes and colours that people were noticing in their insects.