The Arts

In Autahi in the last few weeks we have been exploring the arts in many ways.  We have been exploring weaving, painting, self portraits and music-making.  

Some of us worked on a multiple step self portrait process.  We used mirrors and looked carefully at the shapes of our faces, eyes, noses, ears and the rest of our faces and drew what we were seeing.  We mixed paint to try to make a colour close to our skin.  We used water colours to paint our hair, lips and eyes.  We mixed paint and played with texture to make our backgrounds. And we stuck our faces onto the backgrounds. 

  

Here are some of the finished products!

 

 

We have been exploring weaving.  We have been noticing the pattern you have to follow when you weave and we have been learning about how Maori used weaving to create kete, shelters and garments. 

    

In Music we have been exploring how we can make different sounds with instruments, our bodies and things we can find around us.  This week we went on a nature hunt and created a nature orchestra.

Here we are gathering things we can use as instruments.

 

Have a listen to some of our nature music!

Have a listen to some of our music that we've been playing during Discovery!

We've been exploring with the instruments and practising our singing! 

Stay tuned to hear and see more of our wonderful art!

Come and check out our inquiry wall

In Autahi we are well underway in our musical inquiry. We have begun putting together our Arts celebration show as a way of sharing our learning. The show isn't the only thing we are doing to help you learn more about what we are doing in the classroom. We wanted a way of being able to capture everything we do with our inquiry so that even if you only have 30 seconds on a drop off once a week you can have a look and capture what has been going on around Autahi.

Our inquiry wall is your one stop shop for everything inquiry related. As you can see we have the inquiry cycle starting at 'I am curious' to 'I am exploring' then on to 'I am sorting and creating' then around to 'I am celebrating'.

Each of these areas is another step along our inquiry path. You will see pictures and brief explanations about what we have been getting up to as well as some of our curious questions.

This wall is for everyone in the Autahi community. For the teachers and students it shows our learning pathway as we explore deeper into the musical realm.

For parents it is a chance to engage in our learning and see what is going on in the classroom. We hope that you will come and check it out and be able to carry on some of the learning discussions at home. Sharing stories about your own experiences with music or any other topic can help us all expand our knowledge and helps us deepen those positive relationships we have with friends and family.

So next time you pop by the classroom be sure to poke your head in and share in the amazing Autahi learning.

Our Music Inquiry

We are well and truly into the Exploring part of our Inquiry cycle.  We have been exploring how instruments make sound, what sounds they make, have been writing and playing our own songs on real instruments, been designing and making our own instruments and getting together and creating songs with a 4 beat in small groups.                 

It has been so much fun and we are digging deeper into our big questions:

What is Music and how is it made? How can we make sound and music?

During discovery time some of us have been writing our own songs using the ABCs and then we tried playing them on the Ukuleles!

                      

We made our own instruments and drew our designs and then wrote about how our instrument makes sound.

                     

                    

We used teamwork to create our own little pieces with the instruments we made!

        

We have been learning how to keep the beat on lots of different kinds of drums with Andreas!

We learned about pitch and graphic notation and then we wrote our own songs using graphic notation.  Then we played our songs and a buddy's song.

                         

We have also been listening to and learning Imagine by John Lennon.  We are talking about the message in the music and how artists send us messages through their music and that the tone and words of the music help them do this.  

Stay tuned for more on our inquiry into music!

Our Musical Inquiry and Positive Engagement!

Positive Engagement

The Positive Engagement domain of the Positive Education Model looks at helping students experience complete immersion into something to experience flow.  Being in a state of flow where you are learning and being challenged, but also enjoying what you're doing is invigorating and motivating. 

Immersion into music has certainly been what we've been up to this past week.

We ended last week with some visualisation.  We listened to 4 very different pieces of music and tried to think about the mood it put us in (our emotions) and the story we could imagine accompanying the music.  We drew what we thought.

   

We have had bands forming during discovery time.  During this band practise, the lead was giving everyone their own turn, then they would play the beat altogether!

We had senior buddies come and show us the instruments they were making.

And we had buddies come back to help us make our own instruments.  We had to think about what we needed to use to make our instruments, how they would make sound and then we had to get creating!

And we also had Soma's parents come in and share a wide range of instruments with us.  They played for us and we got to have a turn.  It was awesome.  There were instruments we had never seen before!

We also did some fantastic writing about the instruments!

I like the Seagull because it is like a cowboy.  I like the finger piano too.

I like the drum because it makes a sound like this bing bing bing!

We have definitely been engaged in exploring lots of different ways to make sound and music.  We have also begun to unpack some of the things like tempo and dynamics in music.  Next week we'll talk a little bit about pitch!

Keep following us!