Meet Gillian!

 

This has been a rough flu season and Annie and Beth have both been sick and out class a bit in the last couple of weeks. While we'd far prefer to be in class with the Autahi children, we know that Autahi is in good hands. We are very fortunate to have had Gillian relieving for us in Autahi while we've been away. Gillian has a long association with Worser Bay School. At one time, she was the Team Lead in Autahi, before taking a break to raise her two children. Many of the routines and rituals of our classroom originate with Gillian (think daily Calendar Maths, for one). 

Gillian loves the outdoors, children’s literature, positive psychology, creating, developing a growth mindset, seizing opportunities and pushing herself to try new things.

She brings outstanding skills in the Positive Education and social coaching space. She is focussed on building positive relationships with children, getting to know them well as individuals. She has a keen eye for noticing children's strengths and a knack for making learning accessible and fun for all.  As both a former New Entrant teacher and a mum of young kids, she has a clear understanding of where our children have come from - and where they're heading with their learning and development.

We are so fortunate to have Gillian bring her many strengths to our Autahi team.

Double the fun!

The refeshed New Zealand Maths Curriculum for 6 months to 1 year expects ākonga to have some basic number facts memorised. This includes addition and subtraction facts up to 10 (for example 7 + 3 = 10 and 10 - 4 = 6) and also doubles and halves to 10. Memorising basic facts can give children an advantage when it comes to doing calculations efficiently. This knowledge also adds to their number sense, enabling them to estimate more accurately or spot when a solution 'looks right'. 

Recently, we've been working on our doubles. With much of our maths learning, we start by giving ākonga concrete experiences of new concepts. 

Ladybird spots was our way into thinking and talking about doubles. We explored how a ladybird has the same number of spots on each wing. In the picture below, we made a ladybird with 2 spot on each wing; 4 spots in total.

Here, we're making a ladybird with 6 spots on each wing: 6 + 6 is 12 or double 6 is 12.

And here is how we showed double 4 or 4 + 4 = 8.

Having opportunties to solve problems and explore numbers can really make the learning stick. Here, we asked the children to find as many doubles up to double 10 as they could. Numicon is such a great tool for working with doubles because each piece gives a concrete representation of a number and two pieces the same can be put side by side to represent a double.

 

Working with buddies, the children were able to discover all these doubles facts.

Ākonga began to make some connections with previous learning. They noticed that all of our doubles were in our skip counting in 2s sequence. They also noticed that all of the doubles were even numbers (this is easy to spot using Numicon since the even number pieces have flat tops, while the odds have 'chimneys').

To lock in the learning, everyone had a chance to build and write lots of ladybird doubles.

After all this thinking about doubles, we couldn't help noticing and counting these doubles that appeared when we took our shoes off to go to the library that afternoon.

It's exciting to see our children making these discoveries and connecting their learning to the world around them. 

We will keep practising these number facts. You can support this learning at home, too.

• Have a go at making and saying finger doubles. You can do this by holding up a number of fingers and asking your child to match it. 'Look, I have 3 fingers and you have 3 fingers. How many altogether?' You can also play this game using a reflection in a mirror to make the double, for example at teeth brushing time.
• Games like Pairs and Dominoes build awareness of doubles. 
• Look out for and talk about doubles you might spot when you're out and about. These might be two of the same thing or two of the same number. For example, cars have 2 wheels on one side and 2 on the other, making 4 altogether. Bees have 3 legs on one side and 3 on the other, making 6 altogether. What doubles can you see when you open a carton of eggs or unwrap a bar of chocolate? Soon, you'll be seeing doubles everywhere!

Getting our groove on with the Royal New Zealand Ballet.

We’ve been hard at work developing our dance for our Arts Celebration piece. So, it was perfect timing for a workshop with Jordana from the Royal New Zealand Ballet (RNZB).

At the Arts Celebration, you'll see us using dance to share some of our learning about stars. Based on the New Zealand Curriculum for Year One, our children are exploring how to:

• use their body, face, and voice to ... tell a story, and respond to music

• demonstrate the difference between locomotive (or ‘travelling’) movement, like crawling or jumping, where they move around a space, and non-locomotive movement, like stretching or bending, where they stay in one place

• create simple sequences of movement with different levels, which are the height at which a performer moves, which may be high, medium, or low

• create simple sequences of movement with different pathways, which are patterns a performer creates in the air or on the floor by moving parts of their body through space.

Our workshop with Jordana of RNZB focussed on these kinds of movement: movement on the spot and through space, creating short sequences to tell a story. We also got a taste of the brand new ballet for children that the RNZB has been developing. It's based on the fabulous picture book 'The Bomb'/'Te Pohū' by Sacha Cotter and Josh Morgan. It's a quintessentially Kiwi story of a boy who wants to be able to do the best bomb ever, just like his big brother. 

Linked here is a gorgeous reading of the story by Troy Kingi, accompanied by the NZSO.

Movement without locomotion takes a lot of focus and awareness of our bodies. Our tamariki listened hard to Jordana, warming up our bodies and learning some beginning moves. Then we moved on to some bigger actions that involved moving and leaping around our space. 

We were able to learn some of the choreography from the show, telling the story of this page of the book with dance moves and actions to evoke how the perfect bomb is 'booming', 'slapping', 'splashing', 'dripping' and 'soaking'.

 

We are grateful to Jordana for sharing her knowledge and Zest for dance with us. There is nothing like learning with an expert to build skills and Love of Learning.

Check out the NZ Curriclum Parent Portal page linked here for more on this, and also handy tips on how you can support your child with this learning at home.

And, if you're keen for more, you can catch free RNZB performances of 'The Bomb' at Te Papa on Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th September. Access this link for details of workshops and performances.

The Song of the River: Whānau Day learning with our big buddies

 

At Worser Bay School, we prize tuākana-tēina relationships: children supporting each other with their learning. This can mean the younger ones stepping up to help the older children, just as much as the other way around.

One of the ways we foster this is through our regular Whānau Days, when Autahi tamariki get to work on a project with a group of children from across the school family. Brothers and sisters are usually placed in the same group, too.

The teachers have been engaging with some professional learning around using dance and drama for storytelling. It's a great way to support children to go build oral language, go deeper with a story and find creative ways into writing and the arts. With the Arts Celebration in week 9 in mind, we shared some of this learning with our Whānau groups. Taking Joy Cowley's beautiful picture book, 'The Song of the River', as the our text, we explored how we could enact the journey of a river from the source to the sea.

Grieg's 'Morning' provided a soundtrack to work with, and we spent time unpacking the story and sharing ideas for storytelling movements. How could we be the river, from a tiny trickle to a great ocean? How would the scale of our movements change? How could move as a collective and in time with the music? Could we be the trout in the river? Boats and cranes? Whales and seagulls?

After a morning of intense creativity, we were able to share our performances with the other groups. This was an important opportunity for our Autahi children to have an experience of performing for an audience - and also being a supportive audience for their peers.

Our tamariki came away with some lasting memories of the roles they had played in telling the story.

This experience and all the learning that went with it will help us as we continue our preparations for the Arts Celebration.

The Nitty Gritty of Oral Narratives

When checking out our rātaka to see what we do in a day, you may notice a lesson called, 'shared book'. 

Our shared books, otherwise known as oral narratives, are a springboard for our literacy programme, often helping our tamariki to expand their vocabulary with new words, explore characters and settings, and discover fun language features like rhyme and descriptive words.

Oral Narratives are a cornerstone of our junior literacy program, the Better Start Literacy Approach (BSLA). BSLA emphasises re-reading and exploring rich oral narratives across multiple sessions. To support this, our daily shared book sessions focus on a single high-quality text each week, giving tamariki plenty of opportunities to connect with different elements of the story.

Here are two of our recent oral narratives!

When choosing a book for our oral narratives, we often consider what literary elements we want tamariki to focus on. Our oral narratives books are characterised by three elements: Word level, Sentence level, and Text level. 

Word Level: The Vocabulary This is all about the specific words the author chooses and how they bring the book to life. 

• Juicy Description: Vivid adjectives and punchy verbs that paint a picture in the listener’s mind.

• Topic Words: Non-fiction or subject-specific terms that build background knowledge.

• Fun & Unique Phrasing: Unexpected, clever, or funny word choices that are just plain satisfying to say out loud!

Sentence Level: The Rhythm & Flow Interesting and unique sentence structures introduce tamariki to rhythms and styles that they may not yet be familiar with. 

• Pacing & Variety: A great mix of short, dramatic sentences and longer descriptions to control the energy of the story.

• Poetic Tricks: Features like rhyme, alliteration, and rhythm that give the story a musical feel.

• Flavours of Figurative Language: Similes, metaphors, and repetition that make the text pop off the page!

Text Level: The Big Picture This is the bird's-eye view of the story itself—the framework holding everything together. A solid structure gives your listener something clear to follow.

• A Strong Story Arc: A clear beginning, middle, and end, built around a problem, rising action, and a satisfying ending.

• Memorable Characters: Personalities that feel real, relatable, and entertaining.

• Settings: Descriptions that instantly transport tamariki straight into the world of the book.

Have a chat with your child about our shared books - you might be surprised at what new learning they have to share with you!

100 Days, 10 groups of 10 Cupcakes

We've reached the milestone of 100 days at school. This is no small feat: time to celebrate!

Actually, we've been counting up to our first 100 days at school since the beginning of this school year. We track it each morning on our giant 100 square.

According to our revised Maths curriculum, children are expected to be familiar with numbers 0 to 20 in the first six months at school. After a year at school, they should be familiar with numbers to 100. In practice, this means being able to count and sequence (put in order) forwards and backwards, and also have an understanding of the beginnings of place value. Place value is the value of the digits in a number, according to where they are placed. So, the 1 in teen numbers means 'a group of 10'. The 1 in 100 means 'a group of 100'. We also encourage our students to see that the 10 in 100 means 'ten groups of 10'.

Since one hundred is such a big number to grasp, breaking it down into groups of 10 makes a lot of sense: 10 is a number we're familiar with.

 The tens frames that run alongside our 100 square show how each row of the tens frame make a group of ten: each decade (10, 20, 30, 40 etc.) is a ten. Two digit numbers are comprised of a number of tens and some ones (42 is 4 tens and 2 ones).

We've been practising making groups of 100 things, but arranged in groups of 10.

We have also applied the same thinking to our baking to celebrate 100 days at school. We aimed to bake 10 groups of 10 cupcakes.

After baking and decorating, our yummy cupcakes are ready to eat. We will arrange them in array of 10 groups of 10 before the party. The different coloured icing will help us to see the groups.

Then, we will experiment with how many we have when we eat one, then another and then another...

What is a Star? How are stars made? Autahi explores these burning questions!

Have you ever wondered what a star even is? Autahi certainly has! In fact, to kick off our inquiry this term, we had Autahi ask one simple question each about stars. The most popular pondering was... 

What is a star and how are they made?!

We decided this question needed some serious investigating. 

Our Science curriculum defines a star as "a massive ball of hot gas that emits light and radiation".

NASA's website claims that stars are formed when clumps of gas and dust collide with each other, collecting matter and growing in mass until eventually gravity causes these clumps to collapse. When this happens, friction causes everything to heat up, which eventually leads to the creation of a baby star (protostar).  You can find out more about stars here!

In Autahi, our learning works best when we have an interactive, tangible experience to go alongside all of the big academic concepts. We decided, what better way to learn about how stars are formed than to use play dough and a 3kg medicine ball! You may be wondering... what does play dough and a 3kg medicine ball have to do with astrophysics? 

You see, tamariki were each given multiple small blobs of play dough to represent the clumps of matter (gas and dust) colliding with each other. As they squished and molded their clumps together, they grew in in mass. Eventually, their clumps grew so big that they collapsed! This led to the creation of our baby star, with the heavy, gravity-pulling core represented by our 3kg medicine ball. 

Chat with your child about their inquiry learning at home - they might just have a few "out of this world" facts to share with you!