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!