Oh! Look, a boat! Launching our books - and boats.

Picture books are a great source of inspiration to us. 'Oh! Look, a Boat!' by Andrew J. Ross is our latest favourite. A little red boat floats up the river and past mouse's house. When mouse hops onboard, he finds himself sailing away on a big adventure. The story has so many great connections to our watery inquiry and is great fun to read because it has lots of opportunities to say 'Oh! Look, a Boat!' along with all the creatures that see the red boat bobbing along.

We were inspired! 

Step by step, we wrote our stories, deciding where else our little boats could go and practising our storytelling voices. We each designed a character for the story, to sit in the boat and sail through the book. Finally, we imagined what different characters in our story would say when they saw the red boat, and added some speech bubbles.

This was an opportunity for our Autahi writers to work on a sustained piece of storytelling, adding to it over multiple days, with an audience in mind. 

Here is a taste of our awesome stories. There will be more to see in the upcoming issue of Te Wheke (our school zine) and at our Arts Celebration.

Peck Peck Peck: how we use quality picture books as a springboard for learning.

 

In Autahi, we love picture books and we read plenty of them. But each week, we have an extra-special picture book that is a focus for our Literacy learning and is often connected to our Inquiry themes, or other areas of our curriculum.

We read our special book daily, taking time to learn about new and interesting words (building our vocabulary), characters, settings and also interesting language features such as rhyme or descriptive language. This is part of the Better Start Literacy Approach, which is the cornerstone of our literacy programme in the Junior school.

We also like to find books with interesting themes to get us thinking and talking. 

This week, we have been reading 'Peck Peck Peck' by Lucy Cousins.

This colourful book is about the adventures of a young woodpecker who is learning how to peck. Like our Autahi students, the little woodpecker is an explorer of the world. While we use our eyes, fingers, noses and ears to find out about our world, he uses his beak: peck, peck, peck. The book is made extra-fun by the many holes stamped through the pages, showing where the little woodpecker has been pecking away - and giving glimpses of what might be lurking on the next page.

The little woodpecker shows plenty of Perseverance and Zest as he learns all about pecking by trying it out in lots of different places.

We have been inspired to be explorers, just like the little woodpecker. With our yellow origami beaks, we have peck, peck, pecked our way around our classroom and the playground. 

This has been a rich source of ideas for our writing. In Autahi, writing one good sentence is a key goal. If you can write one good sentence, you can go on to write many, but you have to have the foundational skills to do this in place first. Our students are working hard on tricky transcription skills, such as letter formation, pencil control, phonemic (sound) awareness and spelling. We try to lighten their cognitive load by providing fun sentence starters. In this case, the sentence starter came straight from our picture book and we wrote 'I peck the...' sentences. 

After our pecking exploration of our environment, we were not short of ideas to share with each other, and then try writing. Pop into Autahi to see our finished sentences on display.