Exploring our local library

 This week we ventured down the hill to visit our local library.  One of the many highlights of the week is our visit to the school library to explore our collection of books. Many of the Autahi learners choose to buddy read throughout the day and even spend part of their lunchbreak in the library.

So it made sense that as the weather was turning to some sunshine that we got out and started exploring our local community and the library is such a good place to start.

 As a class we wrote a letter to our school librarian Kirsten to tell her about the kinds of books we like. Exploring genres that allow us to dial up our strength of Curiosity and learn more about our interests. 

In Maths we collected data about what we were looking for in books and did some sorting of that data into whether it was fiction or non-fiction.

At the library we went looking for all of the different kinds of books we might like and even issued a few for us to enjoy in the classroom. Beth and Carl picked out a few for us to use for our oral narrative in the classroom over the next few weeks. For more about Oral Narratives check out this blog here.

We had such a great time at the Library and we encourage you and your whanau to check out some books together too!

Building place value houses - and number sense.

 

At our Celebration of Learning this week, some of our Autahi students shared their learning about place value houses. This is an essential piece of conceptual understanding that will enable our students to work with numbers of all sizes, in all kinds of ways, in the future. Here's some background on how we're working on this with our students. 

Our number system is based on groups of 10. The number 10 is made of 10 ones. 10 tens make 1 hundred. 10 hundreds make 1 thousand. Using this system, we are able to represent very big numbers and decimals, too. But, to work meaningfully with these numbers, we need to have a clear understanding of what they mean.

This is especially true because we represent all numbers using the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. In a three-digit number, the numbers that digits represent gets bigger by a power of 10 with each step to the left. For example, reading right to left, 111 is composed of 1 unit, 1 group of ten and 1 group of a hundred. So the 1 in 100 does not mean the number 1: it actually means '1 group of a hundred'.

In a number like 604, zero is playing a role as a 'place holder'. In this case, there are 4 ones, no tens and 6 hundreds. Without the zero, the number would read 64, which would change the 6 into 60 instead of 600 (incorrect by a power of ten).

 

In Autahi, we use physical materials to help our students to grasp these important concepts. In this photo, some of our students are filling up a tens frame (comprised of two rows of 5) with counters to make a group of 10.

We progress from here onto working with with teen numbers, before gradually moving onto twenties and thirties. Here, we're making bundles of 10 pencils. These bundles can be used as groups of ten to build numbers like 15 (1 group of ten and 5 extra ones) or 23 (2 groups of ten and 3 extra ones).

On this chalkboard, the tens house (marked with a t) contains bundles of ten while the ones house (marked with o) is home to single sticks.

By drawing a place value house, we are able to use these materials to represent the numbers we are working on. We learn that ones go in the ones house until we have 10 of them. Then, they become a group of ten and can go and live in the tens house. Once we have 10 groups of ten in the tens house, they become a group of 100 and must go and live in the hundreds house.

Some students will also begin to use place value to help with with addition and subtraction calculations, often with a hundred square for support. A good knowledge of place value helps them to calculate, but also to estimate and have a sense of what answer they might be expecting from a calculation, so they know if they are wide of the mark. The aim is to build firm foundations for a lifetime of working - and playing - with numbers.

A Game of Chance

 Recently Autahi have been exploring the world of chance and probability. 

The early Maths curriculum has three aspects that learners will explore. These are:

• Engaging in stories and games that involve chance-based situations
• decide if something will happen, won't happen or might happen
• identify possible and impossible outcomes

The best part of this is it encourages playing games involving chance using physical objects like dice, flipping coins, using spinners or pulling things out at random.

Here we are rolling the dice and checking the number. We are counting the dots and seeing how different numbers come up each time.

At Assembly this week we will be showcasing one of the games we have been playing to learn about how we can't predict the outcome but that we can respond to it.

At home you can support this by playing games that involve lots of chance. Games with dice like snakes and ladders are great as well as card games like snap. 

Talk about your predictions about which number they might roll on the dice or which card might come up next. 

Don't forget that there's every chance that learning can be fun too!

Drips and drops: a peak at our Arts Celebration preparations

This week's Blog is a glimpse into the artists' studio as Autahi prepares for the Arts Celebration.

The Arts in their different forms - visual arts, dance, music, drama - are a big part of our day-to-day life at Worser Bay School. Our Arts Celebration gives us a yearly chance to put the spotlight on particular aspects of the arts and work towards some big creative projects to share with whānau. This year, the Arts Celebration takes place on Tuesday 9th and Wednesday 10th September (get those dates in your diary!). Our focus this year is visual arts and it is rather magical to see how the classrooms are transformed into art galleries for these two special days. 

In Autahi, our art springs from our Water inquiry topic, which we've been following now for two terms. As always with the Arts, we aim to do some skills building, as well as giving our students time to create and explore. We have been experimenting with ways to make paint drip, drop and splash. We'll be playing with different materials, painting tools and working at different scales, too. It's action-packed and the results are sometimes unexpected - which is can be both exciting and a little challenging, too. We're learning that art does not have to be a picture of any particular thing and that happy accidents can be part of the process.

We like to keep plenty of surprises up our sleeves to share with you on the days, so we don't want to give too much away. But here is a sneak peak of some of our artists at work in the last week. We hope it whets your appetite for more to come!