Our Pepeha

Pepeha is a way of introducing yourself in Māori. It tells people who you are by sharing your connections with the people and places that are important to you.

In Autahi we have been learning a simple Pepeha that introduces our parents and ourselves.

This is just the first step on our journey as we will continue to add more to our Pepeha over time.

A traditional Pepeha tells the story of who we are by identifying the land we have come from and who our ancestors are. You can continue this learning at home by talking about your own family history, the places you come from and who your ancestors are.

Check out some of what we have been working on to introduce ourselves:

Integrated Curriculum with Teddy Bears

When we talk about having an integrated curriculum we are talking about pulling lots of different strands of the curriculum together under a unified concept.

A great example of that is this weeks Teddy Bear's picnic theme. We are able to pull our reading, writing, maths, arts and others together under the same umbrella. This way we are constantly making connections with all of the learning that is happening around the classroom. We are able to provide a range of provocations and activities that flow seamlessly from one subject area to the next.

Here are some examples of what we have going on around the class this week.

Measuring our toys to graph them from biggest to smallest

Responding to the text Brown bear by writing what our Teddy can see

Using different materials to create new Teddies

The Teddies are a great theme for all of our learning and we have been really engaged in lots of learning and play.

Positive Emotions: Identifying emotions, what makes us feel those and noticing when other people are feeling them

We have been spending a lot of time in Autahi talking about different emotions, what kind of emotions they are, how we can tell when someone is feeling a certain way, what makes us feel these emotions and what we can do when we need to shake off a not as pleasant emotion.  

We looked at different emotions and sorted them onto a grid looking at the energy and pleasantness of the emotion.
Then we played a game with our Empathy boots where we had to step into the boots, act out an emotion and the rest of us had to guess which emotion we were seeing.

We have been doing some writing about what things make us feel emotions from the different quadrants.

Here is some writing about emotions in the Blue zone
 

 

Here is some writing about emotions from the Red Zone
 
 

Here is some writing from the Green Zone
 
 

The Arts

In Autahi in the last few weeks we have been exploring the arts in many ways.  We have been exploring weaving, painting, self portraits and music-making.  

Some of us worked on a multiple step self portrait process.  We used mirrors and looked carefully at the shapes of our faces, eyes, noses, ears and the rest of our faces and drew what we were seeing.  We mixed paint to try to make a colour close to our skin.  We used water colours to paint our hair, lips and eyes.  We mixed paint and played with texture to make our backgrounds. And we stuck our faces onto the backgrounds. 

  

Here are some of the finished products!

 

 

We have been exploring weaving.  We have been noticing the pattern you have to follow when you weave and we have been learning about how Maori used weaving to create kete, shelters and garments. 

    

In Music we have been exploring how we can make different sounds with instruments, our bodies and things we can find around us.  This week we went on a nature hunt and created a nature orchestra.

Here we are gathering things we can use as instruments.

 

Have a listen to some of our nature music!

Have a listen to some of our music that we've been playing during Discovery!

We've been exploring with the instruments and practising our singing! 

Stay tuned to hear and see more of our wonderful art!

Learning Through Play

Play based learning is an important part of our day in Autahi. When we think about the word play we are fundamentally influenced by our own experiences and the culture towards play. Many believe that play is the thing you do after more important tasks or that learning and play simply can not be associated with each other.
Play is a really sophisticated form of development. Children get to do higher order thinking and synthesising of lots of different things. It’s a coming together of cognitive skills and social emotional
skills in one experience.

Take for instance socio dramatic play:

These vets are using lots of communication and social skills as well as exploring something they are passionate about. They are reading and finding out more about the animals they are working with.

Play-based learning is also a chance to flex our strength of creativity:

It is also a chance to work on our goals and challenge ourselves:

Our classroom takes on a different buzz during discovery time. There are so many different learning opportunities hiding in all of the things we do. No wonder they love discovery so much!

Museum of City and Sea

Last week we visited the Wellington Museum of City and Sea as part of our inquiry learning. Our inquiry this term has involved learning about changes on Earth. One of the changes we have been inquiring about is how people came to New Zealand. We are lucky in New Zealand to be the home of many different cultures and people from all around the world. But why do people choose to live here we wondered?
Our inquiry started by thinking about things people need and want. The things we need to survive are essential but if the place we live is lacking some of those things then we may need to change to find a new home. In the early days much of the exploration of the world was to find new places to live as populations grew in major centres. There became less and less space for people so explorers would seek out new places to call home.
Our visit to the Museum was to learn about some of the first voyages to New Zealand. Check out these pictures to see some of the things we saw.