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.