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.
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