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!

Ready, set, fire! The Autahi Slingshot Project

This week, Autahi investigated measurement by building recycled bottle slingshots! Using blueprints from Lorraine at the Wellington City Council, we transformed plastic bottles, rubber bands, and string into awesome launching tools.

Navigating our slingshots wasn't easy. We quickly realized that we needed to dial up our Perseverance, Creativity, and Teamwork, as well as use our Growth Mindsets if we were going to make them work!

Once we felt like professional slingshotters, we put our skills to the test, using our measurement skills to see exactly how far our paper balls could fly!

We discussed how we could go about measuring the distance that our paper balls would shoot. Some idea we had were: 

- measuring with the length of our feet 

- measuring with glue sticks

- measuring with interlocking cubes

- measuring with rulers (who would've thought!)

- and finally, measuring with the height of Jude!

As you can imagine, our last idea was the most popular. After firing away, Annie and Jude would mark the spot where each paper ball had landed. From there, we estimated how many 'Jude's' the distance would be. I think our record was three Judes long!

As exciting as using the slingshots was, we also learned a very valuable lesson; that things do not always turn out as we hope. For every short, underwhelming shoot that we shot, we had to remind ourselves about our Growth Mindsets. We had to tell ourselves 'Keep trying! You will get better with practice'. 

Although we had many 'Jude' length distances being measured, we also had some glue stick length distances as well and that was fine because everyone gave it their best shot!

We are sure you'll have plenty of 'slingshotting' taking place around your whare over the next wee while!

Teamwork in action, down at the beach

Earlier this term, we explored some of the history of Te Whetūkairangi Pā, where our school now stands. We learnt about how Tara founded the first permanent settlement in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Welllington on this site. More recently, we've been focussing on building our awareness of our Character Strength of Teamwork: what we each bring to our collective and how we can play and work together.

This week, we brought together these two threads of of learning with a trip down to Worser Bay Beach. Working in small teams, our goal was to show our learning about pā by building one on the beach - a 'sand pā'. The pā had to include whare, māra kai, fences and defences. We also talking about shaping the sand into hills and mountains so that our pā could be built in safe places.

We thought about the kinds of jobs we would need to do in our teams. The children decided who would be builders and diggers, and who would be 'finders' and decorators, adding other materials such as shells, sticks and seaweed to complete the picture. 

Here are our pā engineers at work and sharing their creations with each other. We're sure you'll agree that great Teamwork leads to some beautiful creations!