Pinchy Pinchy! The importance of a good pencil grip

This term in Autahi, we’re thrilled to welcome seven new tamariki to our learning space—which means seven brand-new authors starting their writing journey!

It’s easy to forget just how challenging learning to write can be for little hands and minds. There are so many skills that have to click together just to form a single word, let alone a whole sentence!

Our curriculum breaks writing down into three main elements: composition, the writing process, and transcription.

We already know that every single child in Autahi has fantastic ideas to share—they often plan their stories out loud by telling us teachers what they want to write. Because their imaginations are already buzzing with ideas, much of our day-to-day focus in Autahi centers on the transcription elements of writing. Right now, that looks like:

• Pencil mechanics: Sitting comfortably, applying the right amount of pressure, and building a functional pencil grip.

The most commonly taught and used pencil grip is the tripod grip.  This is likely the grip that you will use when holding a pen or a pencil. When teaching tamariki, we encourage them to imagine a crabs pincer, and make that shape with their hand. This is where the name 'pinchy' grip has come from!

As you can imagine, developing a solid pencil grip is crucial to forming letters correctly. Therefore, before we even begin to write, it's important to "limber up" and build our hand muscles first!

Just like any muscle, the muscles in our hand that help us with our pencil grip require building and growing. Surprisingly, there are many everyday activities which work on those muscles, and help our tamariki to practice and maintain their 'pinchy' pencil grip. 

Here are just a few examples!

Using tweezers or tongs to pick up small objects is a great way to practice a tripod or 'pinchy' pencil grip and a great way to build the hand muscles!

These tamariki are threading small beads onto bits of string. This activity helps to build up the finger muscles, in particular, the index finger and the thumb muscles! 

You may have noticed that in Autahi, we do our handwriting "old school" on chalk boards. This is for multiple reasons!

Firstly, in order to successfully write with a little piece of chalk, you have to use a tripod grip (a.k.a 'pinchy' grip).

Secondly, the feedback from the chalk against the chalk board teaches tamariki how to use the correct amount of pressure. If they press to lightly, the chalk wont show up, and if they press too hard, then the chalk might snap or crumble! 

Tamariki love stickers! Peeling stickers is not only fun, it is also another great way to help with finger strength and control. 

More at home ideas for building hand and finger muscles:

• Pressing open pegs
• Squeezing a spray bottle 
• Making snakes with playdough
• 
  

Ask your child to show you their 'pinchy' pencil grip at home!

A Zealandia adventure

This week, the Autahi explorers were at Zealandia. It poured with rain, but we zipped up our raincoats and headed out into the ngāhere to see what we could find. Luckily for us, it seemed like the creatures of the bush really like the wet weather. There was so much to see.

'We touched the energy rock.' This special rock is just as you enter the sanctuary. 'We give it our mauri and it gives us some back.'

'We saw the special weasel-proof fence. We tested it with our fingers.' The holes have to be very small because many predators can squeeze through tiny spaces.

'The kererū is my favourite bird.' The kererū had fluffed out their feathers to stay warm, and were hiding from the rain amongst the trees.

'We saw four kererū!' We learnt that they pair up when they are young and stay together for life. 

The tākāhē were sneaking away from us.' We felt very lucky to see them because have just had their bird flu vaccines, so are feeling even more shy than usual.

'The tākāhē were new so they had a new fence to stop them climbing the bank.'

  

'We stood on the fence to try and see the tākāhē again.'

We spotted Pōpokotea (Whiteheads) hopping about in the trees. 

'We saw Tieke in the bush!' And there were lots of them. We could also hear their distinctive calls as they hopped energetically through the branches.

'We saw a gigantic spider!' This is an Orb Spider sitting on its egg sack, which is waiting to hatch out hundreds of tiny spiderlings.

'A stick insect is a rō.' This one likes Tōtara and is a female. You can tell because she's quite large: the males are much smaller and often get mistaken for babies.

It was pretty chilly for Tuatara, but we managed to find a brave one out in the rain. We learnt how to look out for their burrows as they are often close by.

'We saw a shag's nest. Their poo is very smelly because they only eat fish.'

'We found a really big, dead wētā.'

And we also saw tree wētā in bug hotels that were very much alive.

And here's where a kiwi lives. Maybe one day we'll come back for a night safari and try to spot one!

Thank you to our parent helpers who generously gave up their time to help us. And ngā mihi nui to our wonderful guides at Zealandia for leading our expedition and sharing their knowledge with us.

Te Whetū kairangi are stargazers! An out of this world Art Celebration!

 
A star was born! Or should I say, 23 stars were born!

After weeks of learning, crafting, creating, writing, choreographing and rehearsing, Autahi performed their Art Celebration piece over two evenings this week. 

A big experience like the Art celebration requires time to reflect on the highlights, the challenges, and the learning opportunities. Autahi were keen to share their reflections with us!

We finally finished the lanterns!

The Art celebration typically require a terms worth of planning and preperation. Did you know that Autahi began working on their spectacular lanterns about five weeks ago? Some of our Autahian's shared this about their lanterns:

• "Making the lanterns was my highlight!"

• "I enjoyed ripping up the pieces of tissue paper to glue into the lanterns - it was good exercise for my hand muscles!"

• "I loved being able to hold my lantern during the show"

"I am a star so twinkly and bright..."

Getting up and performing in front of a 'Tautoru-full' audience was a new experience for some of Autahi. One person shared that: "at first it was a bit scary having such a big audience, but it was fine in the end". 

The grand finale!

Most of Autahi were in agreeance that their favourite part of the whole experience was the opportunity to dance and sing! Most of you will know by now that this years Autahi cohort are a particularly musical bunch! It's no surprise then to hear...

• "I enjoyed making up the moves ourselves"

• "I enjoyed doing the jumps and twirls"

• "I enjoyed adding the actions to the songs we sang"

• "We had to learn a new song five days! But it was easy"

• "The dancing was my highlight - it was so easy and not scary!"

What a pleasure it was to share this Art Celebration experience with your tamariki. Hold onto these early memories! It’s going to be so special watching how their confidence and creativity grow in future Art Celebrations as they move up through the school.

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.