A perfect day for it!

On Wednesday, many of us were having fun getting to know our new base group teachers in Tautoru. For those of us remaining in Autahi next year, this was a great opportunity to spend some time together down at Worser Bay.

What a perfect day for it! We did lots of digging and building.

And we decorated our sandcastles with shells and jewels we found on the beach.

We even got to meet a hermit crab and this starfish - what a beauty!

We're crossing our fingers that we will have another lovely day like this for our beach visit on Monday.

How big, how long, how wide? Exploring measuring.

This week in Autahi, we have been exploring how measuring works.

We have been using informal units to measure objects around our school. 

An informal unit of measurement can be just about anything: a plastic cube, a glue stick, a bottle top, a hand span or footprint. We use these to learn what measuring is and how it is done before we start using formal units of measurement, such as centimetres.

By using informal units, we can find out how long, tall or wide different things are. If we measure two things or more things using the same unit of measurement, we can compare them and find out which is the biggest. 

Out in the playground, we found many different ways to use our bodies to measure.

How many children long is the bench?

How many foot widths long is the railing?

Small things need a small unit of measurement. How many fingers long is this piece of wood?

We worked together to make sure that we were measuring accurately.

Back in class, we had a go at using some of our classroom equipment for measuring. How many plastic penguins high is a chair? How many pens long is the red mat? So many questions!

We also tried estimating, or making a good guess, about what the answers to our questions might be. Sometimes we got pretty close to the actual measurement. Sometimes we got a real surprise when we measured. 

Dear Zoo...what am I?

We have been reading the book "Dear Zoo" by Rod Campbell. 

In this special book, the animals are hidden behind different things and we have to guess what they are.

We made our own 'pop up' animal cards and wrote some clues about them....can you guess which animal we chose??

Come into class to read and see some more....

Toy Measurement

Every Tuesday in Autahi, we have Toy Tuesday, where we are able to bring a toy to play with and share with our class.

This week we decided to measure our toys from the biggest to the smallest.

We had to do some careful measuring, by putting our toy next to the ones on the mat already and seeing where our toy fits.

When we were finished, we noticed that we had created something....a graph!

We noticed that some of our toys are very small, some of them are very big and lots of them are the same size!

Caterpillars!!!

This week we noticed some new neighbours that had moved into our gardens. We saw lots of caterpillars had moved onto the swan plants in one of the gardens in the school.

We decided to explore who these new friends were and had lots of fun doing it. We explored making 3D shapes to make our own caterpillars.




We did some research and found out the life cycle of a caterpillar. This inspired us in our writing.


And we even created some very hungry caterpillar art to add to the story.

ASB sports day

Last week we went on a trip to the ASB centre for a day of sports. Over the day we had a chance to try floorball, gymnastics, dodgeball and futsal.
It was a good chance to practise some of the skills we have been learning at school and try out some new things we haven't done before.
We needed to dial up our bravery and teamwork so that we could make the most of the new experiences. Most of all it was lots of fun. Check out some photos from the day.

Taking action in our Inquiry

Taking action: our inquiry (part two)

As Kaitiaki of school, we have been keeping an eye on the garden, sandpit and drains.

In the garden, we found that the strawberries are growing very well. We are worried that birds might eat them before we have the chance. We plan to take take action by adding some netting to the beds. 

We were also excited to find that we have some stripy Monarch butterfly caterpillars feasting on the swan plants.

Everyone had a good look but, because we are Kaitiaki, we didn't try to pick up the caterpillars: we would be very sad if we squashed one!

It will be fascinating to watch them grow fatter and eventually turn in to chrysalises.

Meanwhile, the Kaitiaki of the drains have been checking for rubbish. We have found a lot of pencils and, on Friday, eleven plastic fish from the sushi boxes. These things are not biodegradable so won't break down if they get into the ocean. 

We have also found lots of figs that are falling out of the fig tree. What can we do with them? We don't like to waste food at Worser Bay School, but these figs aren't ready to eat yet. This is a problem for us to try to solve.

We have also been keeping the sandpit neat and tidy. The Kaitiaki have been finding all the sandpit toys from around school and making sure they are in the right place, ready to play. On Monday, they worked extra hard and used their Perseverance to move all the tyres out of the sandpit.

Ka rawe tō mahi, Kaitiaki mā!

Rocket Lab Buddies

We are very lucky in Autahi to have some amazing buddies come in from Tautoru to help us with our reading and Rocket words.

They come in twice a week.

They listen to us read our stories and help us when we get stuck.

They help us practise our rocket words, reading them and writing them on to a whiteboard.

Then they read a story to us!

The more practise we do, the better we get!