Last Blog Post of 2021

 Wow! What another amazing year at Worser Bay. Here are some highlights...

And something from the staff...

The Year 6 item...

Anyone for tennis (or soccer)?

This week, we all joined a tennis taster session, and some us us also had the chance to try some soccer. It can take Bravery to take the plunge and try something new, and it was great to see our Autahi children responding with Zest to the challenge.

On Monday, in beautiful sunshine, we welcomed Vojdan from Miramar Tennis Club. Vojdan coached us in some tennis basics, working on our coordination and beginning to control at tennis ball with a racket. It was fun - and a great challenge - to balance the ball on our rackets or take a tennis ball for a controlled 'walk', using a racket to roll it along.

Later in the week, we had a visit from Maia from Capital Football. Maia is keen to get more girls in Wellington involved in soccer. All the Autahi girls had the chance to try out some soccer skills with Maia with chasing, ball control and goal-scoring games. There was a lot of Zest and Love of Learning in our group. 

Look out for more sports opportunities at school for your child as we go into 2022.

Seasons: our new inquiry

This term, we've embarked on a brand new inquiry into the seasons of the year.

In this blog, you'll get a taste of how our thinking has evolved so far, and some background to some of the ideas that our Autahi students might be asking you about at home. I'm also going to try to give you a sense of how Inquiry learning works in our space.

Here is our inquiry model. You have probably seen it on our classroom walls. Sometimes an inquiry can take us around the cycle a few times.

We begin with 'I am curious'.

This is a questioning and wondering phase of the cycle. Sometimes questions arise spontaneously from children's interests. Sometimes, we try to give the children experiences to pique their curiosity. For this inquiry, we went to the theatre to see the show 'Seasons'.

After the show, we did lots of chatting and retelling about our favourite parts of the show. We talked about what we know about the seasons. We thought about the weather.

And also about the different creatures at different times of the year, like Tui laying their eggs in spring - and spiders (the enormous, hairy spider in the show was a big hit!).

We began to collect and share our questions about the seasons and add them to our inquiry wall. Lots of people are interested in the sun, for example.

We know that there will be more questions to add as we learn more.

We realised that we all mostly know that there are four seasons in New Zealand but we're not totally sure about how nature changes in each one. We did some seasons art to help us to think some more about this problem. 

We started exploring our current season, Spring, by doing some planting and growing.

We also went down to our beach to see what nature is doing at the seaside right now, and we've been sketching hedgerow plants from around our school.

We have also begun to respond to some of those questions about the sun, for example who made it and what is it made from? Why is it hotter in some seasons and cooler in others? Here we are having a go at some fiery sun art.

Our questioning and exploring phase continues, and you might find that your child comes home with some questions and ideas prompted by our topic. Ask them about what we've been doing at school and have a chat about their thoughts. Please do feed back to Beth and Carl as we'd love to follow up their wonderings at school, too. That way, we can all live this rich inquiry topic!

Arts Celebration 2021

 This week we celebrated our annual celebration of The Arts at Worser Bay School. In Autahi we had been working towards a self portrait and seeing ourselves as artists. One of the important first steps in any artistic endeavour is understanding yourself as an artist and that your work will look different from other artists. Instead of thinking 'My work isn't as good as someone else' we were learning to say 'That was the best picture of a face that I can do'. 

Changing the language we use as artists really helped us to work on our own pieces without having to worry about what everyone else was doing.

The other key aspect of our art was thinking about the shapes we can see in our art. We always started by adding the biggest shapes first then adding detail on top. Some of the faces have a line through the middle that we used as a mid line. This helped us notice which of our features go above or below the line.

We hope you enjoyed viewing the Art as much as we enjoyed making it.  

Our netball taster session

This week, we welcomed some top coaches from Netball New Zealand to give us a taster netball coaching session. Most of us had never played netball before - but found it a lot of fun. Ask your child about it: there are opportunities from year one onwards to get involved in netball at our school. Talk to Beth or Carl if you'd like to know more.

Chopping our way back into maths

 

This week we have been using lots of different games to get us back into maths.

One of the awesome games was to karate chop a snaplock bag to find new ways to make 10. 

By separating the ten pom poms into two groups we can see the different groupings to ten. 

Then we wrote a number sentence to reflect what we could see in the bags.

Eg. 5 + 5 = 10

There are lots of ways to explore maths at home and at school using different materials.

Why savouring the good stuff in life helps us to flourish.

 

Savouring and Celebrating

As we return to 'school in person', we'll all be reflecting on our lockdown experiences - some good, some challenging, perhaps. And we'll all be thinking about what we've missed about school and looking forward to reconnecting with friends, favourite places and activities. This is a great time to consider the power of savouring.

Recently, the teachers have been doing some reading about savouring. As human beings, we tend to carry a negativity bias. That is to say, our brains cling onto the negative experiences we have and, if we're not careful, one negative experience can have the power to override many positives.

This is where Savouring comes in. Savouring is intentionally recalling and revisiting experiences that nourish us in some way, perhaps by bringing us joy, comfort or a sense of achievement. Savouring boosts the number of 'positive hits' that our brain gets during the day, counterbalancing the negatives. It is also an important way to embed good memories so that we can revisit them in the future.

Taking time to Savour our own achievements is vital, especially when we've put a lot of effort.

Revisiting and savouring memories of positive accomplishment can give us a boost when we are working on new learning. 'Look how many stars I have on my Rocket already! If I learnt all those words, I can nail this new set, too.' This kind of positive forecasting helps us to stay with tricky tasks right to the end because we have the confidence that we have what it takes to overcome challenges.

Savouring can be about being fully present in the moment and recognising that we're having a good experience. 

 It can also take the form of remembering and reminiscing, retelling and sharing - especially if the positive experience is a shared one. In retelling the story of a good experience, we relive it and reinforce its power. Capturing our learning on Seesaw is one way of sharing - and revisiting - positive experiences.

Anticipating something positive that we are looking forward to is also a form of Savouring, this time with a future focus.

Try some savouring today and see if it boosts your mood.