Wednesday, 31 July 2024

Shared writing, writing to share.

 

Our Autahi students are just beginning to explore the craft of writing. Writing is like juggling, requiring us to perform a number of different actions, all at the same time (and keep smiling!). We are using our fine motor and letter formation skills to write letters. We are making word and sentence choices, thinking about spelling and punctuation, while monitoring the ideas we want to convey. And the whole time, our executive functions are in play, checking what we've written, revising, considering our audience, self-regulating. It's a miracle we manage to get anything down on paper at all!


Learning to do all of this is no small feat. It's vital that we never lose sight of the fact that writing is a creative act.


Writing collaboratively gives us a chance to build texts together. We can share ideas and help each other to find the best words possible to express them. We can also share the load of creating a longer piece of writing, such as a poem. Writing with each other in mind also lends our writing an extra level of meaning and purpose. 


This is the story of how we made a collaborative poem together.


Our 'Morning Sounds' poem was inspired by Quentin Blake's picture book 'Mrs Armitage on Wheels'. Towards the end of the book, Mrs Armitage has a mishap. Blake uses a whole collection of noisy words to tell us what has happened to her.


This prompted us to explore onomatopoeia and sound words. We read Roger McGough's 'The Sound Collector', which is packed with sounds. We did some listening and observing in our own environment, too: what sounds could we hear in and around Autahi? We started try out some sentences by telling each other our ideas and collecting useful words in a word bank.

Inspired, we began drawing and writing some of our ideas.



It was clear that many of our ideas had to do with the morning, like the crunching of breakfast cereal and the tweeting of the birds. Each person picked out a sentence and rewrote it. Then, we assembled the sentences into our poem.





It was exciting to read back what we had made altogether. We added some lines at the end that we could all say together. We felt that we had something good that we wanted to share. The next step was performance: we decided to record our poem.







We are very proud of our poem. It was very satisfying to make a piece of writing like this together. We hope that you enjoy it, too.

















Thursday, 25 July 2024

A Taniwha in Autahi! The countdown to the Arts Celebration begins.

 

Our Arts Celebration is on the horizon and we're excited!

Hopefully, by now, you will have seen our magnificent taniwha artwork, which has been taking shape on a whole wall of the classroom. Our taniwha will be watching over us with his beady eyes and giving us inspiration for our creations. He is a first big clue about the theme of our presentation!


The Arts Celebration annual event that gives us the opportunity to think big, create and share our learning with our whānau and school community. We alternate between a visual arts and performing arts focus: dance, drama and music take centre stage this year. 

The Arts Celebration is a highlight of the Worser Bay calendar, and our creations for the show are far from overnight sensations. 

In Term 2, we introduced our Autahi students to many of the themes and ideas that will lie behind our Arts Celebration piece. We explored several local pūrākau, including the story of Ngāke and Whataitai. Thanks to our music lessons with Kirsten, we experienced a whole orchestra's worth of musical instruments and ways to make sound. We began to experiment with pitch and dynamics. 



In Maths, we experimented with repeated patterns and tried some ways to show sound patterns by using pictures or signs. Who can forget our Firebird experience with NZSO: this gave us an impressive experience of how music can tell stories and describe characters. 

This Term will be all about harnessing this learning and getting into some serious creating. We are keen to share our process with you as we go along. There will be lots to talk about at home with your child, maybe some things to practise, and we might also need a bit of help from crafty parents. 


Keep an eye on Seesaw and the Blog to find out more and share the excitement!

Wednesday, 3 July 2024

Our Matariki Stars

 


Matariki is full of rich learning. Over the past week we have been learning all about stars and constellations. We also held our annual bonfire at the beach to star gaze and sing waiata together.



Each of the 9 stars of the Matariki cluster have a name and a purpose. Take Waipunarangi, who is the star of Rain.


We were inspired to make our own stars and give them a name and a purpose. Check out some of our stars below