'Autahi splashed paint and weren't sorry!' Getting excited about our Arts Celebration.

 

We have been working on our Arts Celebration project for more than a term - and the big days are nearly here! We have been exploring the ways we can make paint move and also move our bodies while painting,  taking a little inspiration from Jackson Pollack along the way. 

We are super-excited to share our creations with you. Here's a little teaser.

Unmissable, right? Join us for the Arts Celebration on 9th and 10th September between 5.30 and 7 p.m. to take a wander through our spaces and maybe even try a little splashing, dripping and spraying for yourself.

A Taniwha in Autahi! The countdown to the Arts Celebration begins.

 

Our Arts Celebration is on the horizon and we're excited!

Hopefully, by now, you will have seen our magnificent taniwha artwork, which has been taking shape on a whole wall of the classroom. Our taniwha will be watching over us with his beady eyes and giving us inspiration for our creations. He is a first big clue about the theme of our presentation!

The Arts Celebration annual event that gives us the opportunity to think big, create and share our learning with our whānau and school community. We alternate between a visual arts and performing arts focus: dance, drama and music take centre stage this year. 

The Arts Celebration is a highlight of the Worser Bay calendar, and our creations for the show are far from overnight sensations. 

In Term 2, we introduced our Autahi students to many of the themes and ideas that will lie behind our Arts Celebration piece. We explored several local pūrākau, including the story of Ngāke and Whataitai. Thanks to our music lessons with Kirsten, we experienced a whole orchestra's worth of musical instruments and ways to make sound. We began to experiment with pitch and dynamics. 

In Maths, we experimented with repeated patterns and tried some ways to show sound patterns by using pictures or signs. Who can forget our Firebird experience with NZSO: this gave us an impressive experience of how music can tell stories and describe characters. 

This Term will be all about harnessing this learning and getting into some serious creating. We are keen to share our process with you as we go along. There will be lots to talk about at home with your child, maybe some things to practise, and we might also need a bit of help from crafty parents. 

Keep an eye on Seesaw and the Blog to find out more and share the excitement!

The Arts Celebration 2023

This week, we finally got to see all of our art displayed together in our Autahi gallery, telling the story of our Atua Inquiry learning to date. Relive the Arts Celebration experience here!

Putting the sizzle back in science

My favourite memories of science growing up were always the big flashy experiments. Igniting a balloon filled with hydrogen or burning magnesium strips. Exploring chemical reactions by making hokey pokey or growing crystals were always my favourites.

So in exploring how water changes state we knew that we needed to really show what happens when water meets heat to show the process of heat turning a liquid into a gas.

What better way than using the equipment right outside our classroom door. The barbecue is usually reserved for grilling up sausages on a Tuesday but on this lovely Thursday afternoon it would become a scientific apparatus.

When boiling a jug we observed steam coming out but couldn't see what was happening to the water.
Our purpose was to watch the water change from a liquid in the jug to a gas when it hit the hot barbecue. See what happens next...

After observing the change we raced back inside to record the beautiful descriptive vocab that Autahi were using to describe what they had seen. This will be used to help guide us as we prepare for the Arts Celebration later in the term.

Arts Celebration: Our learning journey

It has been a big build up to our annual arts celebration this year. We have been reflecting on all of the inquiry learning from throughout the year. From planets and space to journeys across the world to New Zealand and to our local environment. We used lots of different styles and mediums to create pieces that show lots of our learning.





Here we are creating invitations for our friends and whanau to invite them along.


We made ink blot insects using kebab sticks and droppers


We stamped our backgrounds to personalise our visual pepeha.



Some fabulous musicians shared their talent with us as we practised our strength of appreciating beauty and excellence.

John showed us lots of the sculptures the seniors were working on.

It took lots of perseverance to finish all the pieces of art.


We used observational drawings of the leaves in our local environments.


We used light to create silhouette art that tells the story of Kupe and the octopus on his voyage to New Zealand.

Thank you all for your support and for helping us celebrate our learning.

Autahi Artist Studio

If you went past Autahi this week, you might be surprised to see artists in residence. As part of our upcoming Visual Arts Celebration, we created an artist space where we could pretend to be professional artist and let our imaginations go wild!

Arts Celebration

We are working hard at the moment gearing up for the arts celebration later this term. In Autahi we are exploring different kinds of visual art and using different mediums to show some of our inquiry learning from throughout the year so far. Each week we will showcase some of what we have been working on and we encourage you all to come and join us in Week 5 to check out our gallery of creations.

Arts Celebration:
Wednesday 21st and Thursday 22nd of August from 5.30pm til 7pm
Come and check out our amazing art from across the school.

Reflecting on goals

This week we looked back on an amazing Arts Celebration. Before we begun down the pathway of creating a show we set some goals about the upcoming show. We talked a lot about the feelings we might have like nervousness or excitement and what we could do to help us achieve the outcomes we wanted. Here are some examples:

Bravery and overcoming fear was a goal shared by many. Others made goals about learning and remembering the different moves they needed to do. We approached the show with a growth mindset, that there were things that we couldn't do yet but with lots of practise we knew we could achieve our goals.

So we practised and we practised and then we practised some more. We used teamwork to learn and guide each other. We took turns listening to the ideas of others. We had to work hard.

But then something amazing happened...

A show started to come together.

And now that the show is done we looked back at what we had achieved and celebrated meeting our goals. Here are some examples of the writing we did today about achieving our goals: