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!