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!

Painting a picture with words

For most our Autahi students, a big goal is to write 'one good sentence'. Sounds simple, right? But, think about it for a moment. To write a good sentence, our students need to know how to hold and control a pencil, how to accurately form letter shapes (the right size, too), how these letter shapes represent sounds. They need to be able to say a sentence, work out how many words are in it, transcribe that sentence a sound at a time, making sure there are finger spaces, no sounds or words are missing, starting with a capital letter and finishing up with a full stop. It's an awful lot to think about - which is why we use smaller 'micro-goals' to support our writers learning journey (see last week's Blog about Kaisen Steps).

As our students come to grips with 'one good sentence', our attention turns to the content of that sentence. Right now, we are gearing up to write some poetry and maybe even a song, that we can share at the Arts Celebration. For this, we need to build our word power: rich vocabulary that we can use to paint a vivid picture with words and engage our audience.

This week, the story of 'How Māui Slowed the Sun' is giving us a dramatic and enthralling context for building our word power and experimenting with descriptive language.

We delved deep into the story, comparing the character of the little star in Oliver Jeffers' 'How to Catch a Star' with the characteristics of the rage-filled, powerful Te Rā in the Māui legend. We closely examined Peter Gossage's powerful illustrations for clues.

Here's the word bank we built.

And we also had a go at writing some simple descriptive sentences, using these words.

How else could we play with this new language? We shared a few concrete poems (poems that are shaped in a way that supports or plays with the meaning of the poem). Then, we began work on an artwork/concrete poem of our own. What if the sun's rays contained words to describe what Te Rā is like?

Our artworks can be enjoyed for their visual impact and also read, like poems.

Join us for Assembly on Friday to see more - or pop by Autahi later this week to see them on display.

Stepping Up our Goals with Kaizen Steps

"You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great"

These are our writing goals broken applied with the Kaizen Steps

In Autahi, we are doing some big thinking around goals. We know that no one masters a skill immediately, but sometimes when we have a big goal, it's hard to know where to even start!

Then we we learnt about Kaizen Steps. The word ‘Kaizen’ is a Japanese word, which means to improve, or to keep getting better at something.

The ‘Kaizen Steps' philosophy is the idea of breaking up big goals into smaller, more achievable steps that you can take your time to master.

We decided to apply the Kaizen Steps to our writing, since every time we write, we work on a 'micro goal' anyway.

Some of our micro goals include: 'Listening for the sounds' and 'Letter size' 

Our micro goals are very similar to the Kaizen Steps philosophy. The wider goal is to become a great writer (every one is capable of that!), however, there are smaller steps that we need to achieve first, before we can become great writers. Some of these steps include:

• Using a 'pinchy' tripod grip on our pencils
• Forming all of the letters correctly 
• Using finger spaces between words
• Sounding out the sounds that we know in words
• Using capital letters and full stops correctly
• Painting a picture with our words.

And everyone's goal (even adults!):

• Re-reading our writing and checking for any mistakes!

Tamariki felt proud to place their goal on a step, knowing that they will soon achieve it and eventually become a great writer!

Ask your child at home what their writing micro goal is - even better - write them a sentence and see if they have a micro goal for you!

Creativity Flourishing!

 Autahi has been having a bit of a deep dive into the gorgeous book " I want my hat back" by Jon Klassen. It's got a simple, repetitive storyline.....with a bit of humour and a fab twist!

We read it, we acted it out, we honed in on expressions and the way the eyes can tell us a lot about emotion. Then we made our puppets and had a mini show. We didn't stop there though- why stop when you are on a roll?!

The children then wrote their own pieces- some took delight in veering away from the book (of course!) These are being illustrated and then will become part of a 'large book' that will sit in Autahi and be enjoyed by the class and whoever pops by and wants to check it out.

Our Puppets!

Our writing and illustrations!

We have been having a ball in Autahi. Have a look at all of our creativity bursting forth in the final weeks of Term 2. Look through our photos - you will see puppets, stories with illustrations all based on " I want my hat back" by Jon Klassen. Amazing abstract geometric shape art supported our 'thinking outside of the box' and our sparkly Matariki stars to boot!