Growing and changing: beginning our inquiry process

 

With a new term comes a brand new Inquiry for our Autahi explorers to delve into.

This is a perfect topic for our Spring term: there will be plenty in the natural world, and our own lives, to explore.

Our Inquiry model follows a cyclical structure.

We begin by wondering and asking questions. As we make discoveries, we are able to act and reflect on our new knowledge. We will find ways to share and celebrate our learning. Our new learning will also prompt fresh questions and wonderings - and on we go!

This week, we are at the 'I am curious' phase of inquiry. At this stage, we like to keep the inquiry very open and discover what knowledge our students have already, and also what areas of our our inquiry topic are most interesting to them.

You may have seen this table in our classroom.

Sorting and categorising is often a good way to tap into what children already know about a topic. By exploring the objects in this collection, we invited our students to think about 'which things grow?' In doing so, we also had to consider how we know that something is growing or changing. We began to collect some ideas and will dig into this theme further in the course of our Inquiry.

We then began to make a collection of sketches of things we think grow - and things that do not. 

As you'll see from our pictures, the natural world features strongly in the 'things that grow' category. The 'things that don't grow' category is more mixed. It includes natural objects like shells and fruit, as well as man-made objects like houses and shoes.

We also have questions about what actually happens when different kinds of things grow (for example, snakes shed their skins).

This is a great topic to chat about at home. Ask your child which things they think grow - or don't grow. Or maybe spot some growing - or not growing - things when you're out and about. And do drop by and take a look at our Inquiry wall: it will also be growing and changing as our investigation progresses!

A festival of Chinese language!

 

September 22nd to 28th is Chinese language week. We were very keen to celebrate since we have a number of Mandarin speakers in our school community. Luckily, we had four expert teachers who joined us on the last day of term: Kurt, Clare, Yinjing and Ruotong. We are so grateful to them for sharing their language and culture with so much Zest and Creativity: xie xie! 

Here are some highlights from an action-packed morning of learning.

Aisha and Everette helped out with some role-plays. We practised saying 'xie xie' (thank you), 'ni hao' (hello), 'dui bu qi' (sorry) and other handy phrases.

Then we had a chance to do some writing. Kurt showed us how some Chinese words look like their meaning. This helps a lot when learning thousands of characters. 

We even got to act out some of the words. 'Zuo' means 'sit' and looks like two people sitting back to back on a bench.

Here is 'shui' (water), which looks like three gushing streams of water.

'Shan' is a mountain. This mountain has three peaks, with the tallest peak in the middle.

We had a go at writing the characters. It was fascinating also to hear about how the character for words like 'horse' have evolved from a literal picture of a horse into the stylised character that is used today.

Next, some music! Yinjing and Ruotong shared a beautiful, traditional song about the jasmine flower. We have been learning a lot about different kinds of musical instruments lately, but seeing and hearing the accordion played as something new for us.  

Finally, some crafting with Clare, who showed us how to make delicate paper flowers by folding and cutting paper. 

It took quite a lot of concentration, careful drawing and cutting to make the flowers.

Opening out the folded paper to reveal the flower was very satisfying! We will definitely be making more of these.

Thank you once again to our wonderful teachers. We are so fortunate to have parents in our community who share their expertise and passions so generously. 

Reflecting on a busy term

 Here at the Autahi Blog HQ, we wanted to take a look back at lots of the amazing things we got up to over this term and highlight some cool things you might have missed. So sit back and let us take you through our third term of the year.....

The Arts Celebration

It all started with some Taniwha. Exploring the story that lives right on our doorstep was such a rich and powerful motivator for learning more about the performing arts.

We have covered many areas in the Arts including the giant visual art piece that currently resides on our back wall. 

Come and relive the journey from inception, to creating soundscapes, to blocking out movements and finally to our big performance for our school community. With an added bonus of a tour of some of our local ECE.

Taniwha in Autahi

Learn more about the story we used here: Ngake me Whātaitai

Relive the night of our big show

And check out the Taniwha on tour

Quite the fellowship we have going to visit our friends at Miramar North Kindergarten and Tuatara Kids!

Brain Science

Another theme this term was learning a little bit about our brains and how the Arts help us to spark our brains into action. 

We explored some of the science behind having a Jam (in the musical sense) and how it builds up our sense of teamwork.

Creativity and imagination played a big part in our learning this term. You can check out more about some of the many ways we can foster a sense of imagination in this blog.

Shared Writing

The Arts isn't all we have been up to. Come and check out a particularly noisy poem we created that was inspired by one of the amazing picture books we had been reading.

Wow! We had a lot going on and this barely covers all of it. We hope that you all have a great Term Break and we look forward to exploring more learning in Term 4!

Taniwha on tour!

We love to take any opportunity to visit our friends at our local kindergartens and ECEs. New students in Autahi bring with them rich experiences, stories, relationships and knowledge that they have gained during their pre-school lives. We know that our students have so many happy memories of kindergarten and treasure the relationships they formed with their teachers. Our hope is to continue this learning journey in Autahi.

Having worked hard on our taniwha story for the Arts Celebration, we felt that we had something worth sharing more widely, and decided to take our taniwha on tour.

If you were out and about locally this week, you may have glimpsed a taniwha at large in the streets of Miramar!

Swishing our cloaks was a lot of fun!

Our first visit was to Miramar Central Kindergarten. 

It was a good challenge to perform our show in a different space. We certainly brought the drama!

Next stop, Kidz Corner.

Then, a well-deserved snack on the field and a chance for the taniwha to run wild in the sunshine!

Sharing our taniwha has been a wonderful way for our students to stay connected with their kindergartens. We are very grateful to Miramar Central Kindergarten and Kids Corner for hosting us and giving the Autahi children such a warm welcome. Our students have had a real-world experience of Positive Purpose: sharing something they have made with others and getting to hear the kind and encouraging words of their audience in return. It has also been a chance for some of our students to make a return visit their own kindergartens, bringing their school class with them, which is pretty special.

In week 10, we'll also be paying Miramar North Kindergarten and Tuatara Kids a visit. How exciting!

The Big Night of the Show

 This week we celebrated our learning through the performing arts at our annual Worser Bay School Arts Celebration. 

In the lead up we showed some of our work leading up to the big night and I encourage you to go back and read into those posts.

Some of the children reflected that they had felt scared about performing for others but were proud of themselves for giving it a try. We talked about the Strength of Bravery and how sometimes we use Bravery to feel the fear but do it anyway. A good lesson for us all about taking risks and giving things a go.

Here are some pictures of our Autahi performers.

Act 1 - Te Ika a Māui

Act 2 - The Three Taniwha

Act 3 - Breaking the Jawbone and the Spirit of Whataitai

We hope that you enjoyed our show!