Ngā Tohu o te Taiao (The Signs of Nature)

This week, we have had the excitement of a trip to the NZSO schools' concert, Ngā Tohu o te Taiao.

Building up to our trip, we did quite a bit of learning about some of the instruments in the orchestra that we would be hearing play. This included a live, interactive Zoom with the NZSO's Animateur, Chris Lam Sam and also a couple of musicians from the orchestra.

And, as an extra bonus, we welcomed Kiri earlier this week. We are grateful to Kiri for sharing her musical expertise. She helped us to learn a waiata to sing with the orchestra, and also introduced one of the pieces we heard at the concert: Morning Mood from Grieg's Peer Gynt. He tino ataahua te puoro!

NZSO put together a beautiful programme of music relating to the natural world. Experiencing a live orchestra is always a feast for the senses: there is so much to see as well as to hear, and it is thrilling to be in the same room as an orchestra when it is playing to full effect. Everything vibrates with sound!

Along with the orchestra, we also got to see Marcus Winter, a.k.a. 'The Sandman', weave his magic. We got to hear come specially-composed music, telling the story of the tohu (signs) in nature that reveal the changing seasons. Marcus accompanied the music with some stunning, live visual art and taonga puoro. 

It was pretty exciting to share all of this with the other local schools who packed out the auditorium. A highlight was when the whole audience perform the song we had all been learning together, accompanied by the orchestra.

Visitors bringing new learning and trips out of school are such an important part of our rich programme. We've come back to school with wonderful memories of what we saw and heard, and heaps of inspiration for our own creative exploration, storytelling and musical adventures.

Hearing and recording sounds

 One of the key skills for writing is the ability to hear each of the sounds within a word and record them to write it. 

As adults you might hear yourself sounding out a word like 'supermarket' when writing it down. We are tapping into our phonemic knowledge and accessing spelling patterns that we might know that give us the sounds we need.

As children are learning to write they use alphabet cards to support this process. We use the prompt of 'What can you hear?' followed by 'Now which letter makes that sound?' to help learners go through the process of sounding out words.

A word like cat has three individual sounds. As you make each sound you record the corresponding letter. In the example above a learner has listened for the 4 sounds in the word pink and recorded each sound in a box. The boxes can help support the writer to be sure of how many sounds they need. 

Here we can see some great attempts at the words mucked and about. In the word mucked they have recorded the dominant sounds they can hear and when they have learned the spelling pattern for using an -ed at the end of a word they will successfully be able to spell the word without support. 

The ou sound comes up later in the structured literacy programme yet we can give learners a heads up what they might expect in future learning and praise the effort for trying a tricky sound.

This is just one of the skills we use for writing. It takes lots of practice and the next time you need to spell out a word, ask your learner to help or model how you do it with them. Seeing adults as learners to will blow their minds!

Supporting your child with reading at home: some tips.

 

Once your child has mastered a small number of letters and sounds, they will start to bring home a reading book each week. To follow up on our recent Literacy workshop, here are some tips that may help you to get the most out of reading at home with your child

Some general tips.

Little and often is best. In Autahi, just five or ten minutes of reading a day at home can make a big difference. Your child will only bring a book home when they have worked on it at school and are familiar with it. Reading at home is a time to practise the skills they are acquiring, and also to share and celebrate their learning.

Plenty of praise and encouragement is a vital part of supporting your child’s reading journey. Learning to read is complex and challenging. Praise their effort and all reading attempts.

It’s worth experimenting to find the best time of day to read together. Bedtime is a perfect time to read to your child, but may not be the best time to ask your child to read to you. Some families find that breakfast time, when they’re feeling fresh, works for them. 

And, if your child is too tired to read, it’s fine to read to them.

How our reading books work.

In English, individual phonemes (sounds) are mapped onto letters and letter combinations (graphemes). Your child is learning how to read words by recognising letters and letter combinations (for example, th, sh and ch). When reading a new word, they say the sounds they recognise (‘sounding out’) then blend them together to say the word (‘m-o-p, mop’).

Each of our reading books is designed to give your child the chance to practise particular phonemes. As your child is introduced to more phonemes, these will start to appear in the reading books they bring home. This strengths-based approach sets your child up for success by only asking them to decode letter-sound combinations that they know.

Check the back page of the book to find out more about the focus sounds. The books contain occasional high frequency words that your child cannot decode yet (e.g. me, my, the and to). The reading notes list these as ‘words to tell’ and it’s fine just to give the word and let your child move onto the words they can decode.

These phrases might come in useful as you coach your child through their reading book.

Praise

Great sounding out!

Good job. I can hear you saying all the sounds in the word.

Great blending!

I can see you are using your Perseverance to keep trying. Well done.

Supporting skill development

That doesn’t sound quite right to me. Can you give it another go? (To encourage rereading and self-correction.) 

You said all the sounds. Now, blend them together to say the word. (If sounding out, but not blending.)

What sound does this letter/digraph make? (Give the sound if they’re unsure.)

Last but definitely not least …

If this all sounds like a lot, keep in mind that any reading that you do with your child is helping them to become a reader and discover a love of books and stories.

And please chat with Beth and Carl about reading at home. We are always keen to know how it’s going and share ideas.

Does it float?

 Autahi have been hard to work experimenting with floating and sinking. Like scientists, Autahi learners made predictions about which items would float on the water and which would sink to the bottom.

Here are our predictions. Would you agree with some of them?

This is a great experiment that you could try at home especially with some wet days ahead of us. Making predictions, testing and finding some results are all a part of a scientific process. 

The more we explore the world around us, the more we start to understand how things work.

What's inside an artist's head?

Ever wondered what goes on in the head of an artist? 

We have been inspired to explore this idea by Ed Vere's wonderful picture book The Artist.

The Artist in the story has a head full of ideas and images. This is her world and helps her to create her art.

We began a conversation in Autahi about what we enjoy thinking about and what fills up our heads. Talk became some writing, and then drawing. We asked our artists to draw each idea on a separate piece of paper. It was fascinating to see what each person drew, from diggers and police dogs to butterflies, unicorns, friends and family.

They painted each drawing carefully with water colours. When the paint was dry, we outlined some bold details in Sharpie before bubble-cutting each picture.

Each artist collected between six and ten ideas so we had lots and lots of small works of art on the go.

Taking inspiration from The Artist, we made a large silhouette of each person's head by using a torch to project their shadow onto a wall. This may have been the trickiest part of the process: everyone had to keep very still so that their shadows could be drawn onto black paper.

We placed all of the small artworks inside the our silhouette heads. The finishing touches were to create colourful backgrounds to frame our 'heads' and contrast with the black, as well as a few decorations in oil pastel.

Here is a little taster of our finished art.

This art piece took us many weeks to complete and we are very proud of how it turned out. Drop by Autahi and visit our gallery for more glimpses of what goes on in the heads of our Autahi artists.

 

 

What's on our walls

In Autahi, our classroom walls often tell a story about our learning. The Hundreds Square helps us to track how many days we have had at school. We move the peg along each day and slowly fill up our corresponding tens frames. This is supporting our learning about groups of tens and extra ones. It is also slowly tracking our way towards our 100 days of school celebration.

Our Inquiry book is full of insights and new learnings about water. It is full of students ideas and wonderings. 

Our learning even spills over onto the walls as we fill it with new ideas and great memories that we can savour as we look back and remember the fun we had finding out about different concepts.

Finally our incredible artwork is showcased for all to enjoy in our library corner. This time adding vibrant daytime colour with cooler nighttime tones.

We are excited about what might be there after another terms worth of learning and look forward to sharing it with you through our blog and in our classroom.

 

The Great Water Challenge!

This week, Autahi have been exploring measurement. In particular, we have been building the vocabulary we need to talk about size (heavy, light, tall, small, short, wide and so on). This has also included ways to compare the relative size of objects, such as taller, taller or heavy, heavier. Our Autahi students have also had the chance to do some experiments with volume, estimating how many cubes a container will hold and then filling it up to test their ideas.

In The Great Water Challenge, they had to choose from a selection of containers. Which would hold the the most water and also keep the water safe so that they could transport it quickly from one bucket to the next?

This is a version of a challenge that our Senior students did recently, so we were lucky to have the help of some experts.

Creating opportunities for our older students to be big buddies for the younger ones is a win for all. This tuakana-teina relationship gives our younger students a chance to be mentored by older children who can share knowledge, model learning behaviours and offer encouragement and support. Meanwhile, our tuakana/big buddies embed previous understandings by teaching them to another person. And they get to dial up their Kindness, Leadership and positive coaching language. 

All of this was in full force during our Great Water Challenge.

There was a lot of discussion to be had about which containers worked best to transport the water. While the syringe was safe (and squirty in a very fun way!), it didn't hold very much water. The measuring cup was very open, so prone to spillage. The mini purple wheelie bin was a surprise hit: having a lid, it minimised spillage meaning that our experimenters could run fast with it.

Thanks to our tuakana for helping us with this fun experiment.

We give things a try!

 Last week we kept the school open later than usual to host our parent community in some Positive Education workshops. You can find a link to all the presentations here. Positive Education Workshops

The children in Autahi were excited about their whanau coming into school to do some learning and wrote some invitations.

A lot of the learning that happens in the first year at school is being experienced for the first time and this means we are constantly asking learners to give things a try. This can be anything from letter formation to strategies for adding to throwing and catching a ball. 

So alongside all this learning we have to balance this with learning about how we can manage these new challenges and have some fun while we are doing it.

The Autahi learners off to give things a try!

In our classroom you might hear the phrase "Mistakes help your brain grow" or "At school we give things a try". These handy phrases help us to see new things as something we can give a go and start on a pathway to learning. 

Research shows that pushing ourselves to experience new things is great for our brains. New learning involves a process of giving things a go and then practicing that learning to form pathways in our brains. The more we practise, the stronger that pathway becomes. 

Below are some mini challenges that you could try. You never know what you might discover when you try new things!

• Try sitting in a different place at home or in the office.

• Take a different route to a familiar place.

• Brush your teeth with the hand you don’t usually use.

• Try listening to a different genre of music.

• Give a new food a try.

The Great Autahi Handwriting Challenge!

Last week, Tautoru's Blog post focussed on handwriting: click through this link to read it. It includes a handy overview of how handwriting develops as children progress through the school. 

Along with a number of local schools, we are participating in The Great New Zealand Handwriting Challenge. In all of our classrooms, you will find us engaged in quality handwriting practice for at least ten minutes a day. This is time well spent: being able to write comfortably, clearly and at pace is essential for so many areas of learning. There are also proven benefits to both reading and spelling from learning to write letters correctly and consistently.

It will be no surprise to learn that, in Autahi, we invest a lot of time in letter formation. Our students are in the process of learning and embedding phonics knowledge that will be the foundation of their literacy. As they learn letter names and sounds, they also learn how to write them. This is vital: neuroscience tells us that decoding (reading) and encoding (writing) are intimately connected in our brains, supporting each other.

Learning to hold a pencil correctly in a tripod grip can be a challenge. Using shaped pencil grips or three-sided pencils can be helpful.

Holding a writing implement correctly and controlling it to make accurate letter shapes takes a surprising amount of physical strength and coordination. Most of our writing is done at a desk, encouraging correct posture and book orientation. It takes core strength to sit and remain stable while writing. More than this, our children have to develop many small muscles in their hands to enable them to control a pencil and provide the right amount of weight to their pencil strokes (not too light and not too hard, either). 

We find that drawing is a great way to build writing stamina. But many children also benefit from writing with chalks outdoors, painting, manipulating Lego and puzzle pieces, using tweezers and threading beads. 

All of these activities recruit muscle strength and fine motor control. We have also seen some success in a 'big to small approach': encouraging students to make letter shapes on large paper or on our outdoor chalk boards. Then, gradually reducing the size bit by bit, to fit the page of a book as the child's motor control develops.

 

In an apparent return to a bygone age, we have recently begun to experiment with using small sticks of chalk and chalkboards for our beginner writers. This suggestion comes from Dr Helen Walls, one of the brains behind The Great New Zealand Handwriting Challenge.

The chalk can only be held with a tripod grip while the sensation of the chalk on the board gives more sensation and 'feedback' than a whiteboard or paper. This helps to embed the movements needed to make the shapes and also tells the writer if they are pressing too hard: the chalk will break.

As our writers begin to produce their letter shapes more smoothly, they progress practising handwriting in books. They refine the size, position and orientation of their letters. We learn letter shapes in groups according to similar movements: for example, c, a, d, g, s and e all use an 'open mouth' letter c shape. We use consistent language to describe the shapes and encourage children to say what they're doing as they write. An added benefit of this is that it gives us a common language (used school-wide) to talk about the moves and shapes we're using when forming our letters.

 

There is a lot to absorb here, but it is a gradual process. A little and often works best. And handwriting can be quite peaceful and mediative. It is often a little oasis of calm in our day that we all enjoy!

 

Finally, let's not lose sight of why we're putting in all this effort. Having beautiful handwriting is not an end in itself: our aim is to equip our students with the foundational skills needed to create and communicate with confidence. When children can form letters and words with ease and fluency, their writing can truly take flight.