Why play?

In Autahi we have lots of fun learning and playing together. With international play day last Friday we did lots of talking about how we like to play and have started learning about how we can make our play awesome for everyone.

We thought about things we like to play and what makes play really fun for us. Then this week we took our play out onto the back court where we had lots of fun playing football. 

Play is a really important part of learning and we will continue to explore different aspects of play and how it helps us develop through this blog over the year. So stay tuned for more info and lots of examples of play.

Global play day

Global School Play Day

Global School Play Day is an initiative started back in February 2015 that promotes unstructured play in schools. This means that we don't direct the play and let the learners explore things naturally and in their own way. Play is a way for us to find things that we are passionate about and try new things. It takes the pressure away from 'getting things right' and allows us to give things a try that we otherwise might steer away from.

Some of us explored the instruments and tried making music together. Carl tried singing us a song but we think he might need to keep practising.

We made a pet shop for lots of the animals. We made food for them and made some homes for them. 

We worked together to create things we enjoyed. Some of us made marble runs and others made tracks for the cars to drive around on.

We explored some of the maths equipment and tried making patterns with beads and seeing how long we can make the chain. We even tricked people into thinking we had made some snakes.

In the afternoon we grabbed our sun hats and took the play out into the playground. We took turns zooming down the slide with our toys and climbed trees and climbing walls. There was also a lot of swinging on the monkey bars.

When the day was finished we were all really tired from all the fun. Lots of us made new friends and got to try a lot of new things that we might want to explore more of through our play in discovery time and out in the playground.

Global Play Day

               We celebrated Global Play Day on Friday 9th February. 388, 493 participants took part across the world. Our students enjoyed playing games with each other. It was interesting to see how they used their imaginations to invent new games.

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ~ Plato

We got to play inside, outside with our big buddies and with Tautoru.  We had so much fun exploring and meeting more seniors and Tautoru kids.

 We played in Autahi with our Year 5 buddies--these are the same buddies from last year who came to Rising 5s and hung out with us on a Wednesday!

  In the afternoon we mixed up into groups of children from Autahi, Tautoru and Mahutonga/Matariki and we came up with different games. 

We played Families and were deciding who was going to be whom in the game.

 We played Duck-Duck-Goose

 We were playing an Army Spy Game

 We decided to have a tire race--we were seeing which tire went furthest and came in first!

Overall, it was a fantastic day and we loved getting to reconnect with our big buddies, use our imaginations and show manaakitanga by being inclusive and considerate of others in our play!