Whānau Day - Tāne and the Baskets of Knowledge

On Friday, we had our first whānau day of the year. This is an opportunity for mixed groups working together across the school and fostering Tuakana-teina Positive Relationships. Tuakana-teina is a concept from te ao Māori. It refers to the relationship between an older (tuakana) person and a younger (teina) person. It is when an older or more expert tuakana (brother, sister or cousin) helps and guides a younger or less expert teina. These roles can be reversed at any time as we see some of our younger students as leaders.

In our groups, we learnt the story of Tāne and the Baskets of Knowledge. We expressed our learning in lots of different ways. Ask us what we learnt...

Here is the story of Tāne

Goal setting and 'The Power of Yet'.

This week, our Autahi students had their first taste of our Goal Setting process. This is something we do throughout the school: it looks a little different in each space to suit the age and stage of our students. 

Our Autahi students conference with their teachers and decide on something they are proud of that they can do NOW. They then think about the things that they can't do YET - and choose two. These are our students' goals. We ask them to draw their ideas. The drawings give us plenty to talk about and help us to discover what our students' choices mean for them.

We usually find that our students students think big. We encourage their aspirational thinking: goals should be substantial.  'I want to write a story' and 'I want to count to 120' are chunky goals that will take time and effort to achieve. This can make it hard to know where to begin. This is where Kaisen steps come in. When conferencing with students and their whānau, we have the opportunity to break down these big goals into a pathway of smaller steps. For example, 'I want to write a story' might begin with telling or drawing a story or learning some letters and sounds. Kaisen steps give our students meaningful actions that they can take straight away. They also give students the chance to experience Positive Accomplishment on the way to achieving their big goal.

Of course, there are going to be bumps in the road: learning new things is should be fun. But, where learning is happening, there are always challenges as well. At Worser Bay School, we draw on the work of Carol Dweck, who has researched and written extensively about Growth Mindset - or The Power of Yet. Struggle is intrinsic to learning. Developing the skills to respond positively when the going gets tough is what makes great learners. Your child will be working on this throughout their time at WBS.

An example you will have come across in our Goal Setting meetings is our Character Strengths. We help our students to recognise the strengths that they have - such as Bravery, Curiosity, Perseverance and Humour - how to 'dial them up' to help with different challenges and situations. We also work on strategies to cope with feelings of frustration, how to get unstuck or find help. And we are always keen to notice and praise our students' effort, grit and determination. 

For more on this, take a look at Carol Dweck's Ted Talk about The Power of Yet.

And for fun, The Power of Yet by Janelle Monae and Sesame Street.

The importance of phonics

 In Autahi we are always talking about letters and sounds. All through the day we are exploring in different ways how letters work. This is the cornerstone of our literacy programme and without it we can't become the readers and writers that we know we can be.

By definition, phonics is:

The skills of segmentation and blending + a knowledge of the alphabetic code.

Research shows that one of the leading indicators of reading achievement is phonological awareness.
In short, knowing letters and the sounds they make.

You will hopefully be familiar with the alphabet cards that we use in Autahi 

When we use these cards we talk about how letters have two things:

A name and a sound.

Take for instance the letter s. When we say its name it sounds more like es. But when we make the sound it is a longer sssss sound. Knowing these difference helps learners to go between identifying a letter and using their knowledge of the sound to make sense of it. 

As part of our reading programme this year we want to encourage you to sing along and support your child in learning all the letters and sounds they make.

 

We are curious!

Inquiry is our opportunity to spread our wings and explore a wide range of topics and ideas from across the curriculum. 

This week, we embarked on a brand new inquiry cycle that we will stay with, in different forms, throughout the school year. Here's our Inquiry Model:

We begin in the 'I am curious' part of the cycle, with a stimulus that will encourage us to ask some juicy questions. This week, we did some thinking about words like 'who', 'when', 'where', 'which', 'what' and 'how'. Later, we discovered some interesting maps, atlases and globes in our classroom. We had lots of questions and were able to use our question words to help us to say what our wonderings were.

The map of Aotearoa sparked a lot of interest with questions about locations we had visited, and also the birds and animals shown on it. Is a kiwi really fluffy? Where is Splash Planet in Hastings? Where does my grandma live? Where is Upper Hutt? 

There were also questions about the pictures of ships and waka that we'd added to the display. Who did they belong to? What were they? We chatted about trips we'd made by ferry, car and plane.

The globe prompted a more geological line of questioning: is this a planet? How close is the sun to the earth? Why does the earth have earthquakes.

We collected all of these questions on postits. As we move into the 'I am exploring' phase of our inquiry cycle, we hope to burrow into as many of them as we can. Some will be mini inquiries that we can explore in a short time; others are more chunky and will take a little longer. We may follow a few mini inquiry cycles.

One area that has sparked a lot of interest is finding the places where people in our family live or have connections. We will definitely need some whānau help with this, so please keep an eye out on Seesaw and email for more on this topic. In the meantime, why not begin a conversation at home about the places that are important to your family. We are curious to know more!