Arts Celebration 2021

 This week we celebrated our annual celebration of The Arts at Worser Bay School. In Autahi we had been working towards a self portrait and seeing ourselves as artists. One of the important first steps in any artistic endeavour is understanding yourself as an artist and that your work will look different from other artists. Instead of thinking 'My work isn't as good as someone else' we were learning to say 'That was the best picture of a face that I can do'. 

Changing the language we use as artists really helped us to work on our own pieces without having to worry about what everyone else was doing.

The other key aspect of our art was thinking about the shapes we can see in our art. We always started by adding the biggest shapes first then adding detail on top. Some of the faces have a line through the middle that we used as a mid line. This helped us notice which of our features go above or below the line.

We hope you enjoyed viewing the Art as much as we enjoyed making it.  

Our netball taster session

This week, we welcomed some top coaches from Netball New Zealand to give us a taster netball coaching session. Most of us had never played netball before - but found it a lot of fun. Ask your child about it: there are opportunities from year one onwards to get involved in netball at our school. Talk to Beth or Carl if you'd like to know more.

Chopping our way back into maths

 

This week we have been using lots of different games to get us back into maths.

One of the awesome games was to karate chop a snaplock bag to find new ways to make 10. 

By separating the ten pom poms into two groups we can see the different groupings to ten. 

Then we wrote a number sentence to reflect what we could see in the bags.

Eg. 5 + 5 = 10

There are lots of ways to explore maths at home and at school using different materials.

Why savouring the good stuff in life helps us to flourish.

 

Savouring and Celebrating

As we return to 'school in person', we'll all be reflecting on our lockdown experiences - some good, some challenging, perhaps. And we'll all be thinking about what we've missed about school and looking forward to reconnecting with friends, favourite places and activities. This is a great time to consider the power of savouring.

Recently, the teachers have been doing some reading about savouring. As human beings, we tend to carry a negativity bias. That is to say, our brains cling onto the negative experiences we have and, if we're not careful, one negative experience can have the power to override many positives.

This is where Savouring comes in. Savouring is intentionally recalling and revisiting experiences that nourish us in some way, perhaps by bringing us joy, comfort or a sense of achievement. Savouring boosts the number of 'positive hits' that our brain gets during the day, counterbalancing the negatives. It is also an important way to embed good memories so that we can revisit them in the future.

Taking time to Savour our own achievements is vital, especially when we've put a lot of effort.

Revisiting and savouring memories of positive accomplishment can give us a boost when we are working on new learning. 'Look how many stars I have on my Rocket already! If I learnt all those words, I can nail this new set, too.' This kind of positive forecasting helps us to stay with tricky tasks right to the end because we have the confidence that we have what it takes to overcome challenges.

Savouring can be about being fully present in the moment and recognising that we're having a good experience. 

 It can also take the form of remembering and reminiscing, retelling and sharing - especially if the positive experience is a shared one. In retelling the story of a good experience, we relive it and reinforce its power. Capturing our learning on Seesaw is one way of sharing - and revisiting - positive experiences.

Anticipating something positive that we are looking forward to is also a form of Savouring, this time with a future focus.

Try some savouring today and see if it boosts your mood.

Reading and writing at home

Flicking the switch from in class teaching to our home learning program has really made the Autahi team look at what is possible when we suddenly have so many extra teachers. We warmly welcome you to our team and are here to support you in your new role.

I wanted to really dive into some of the how and why we teach the way that we do. We understand that some things in our program are familiar and some aren't quite the way you might remember doing them back in the day.

• Writing works best when children have a purpose for writing and are encouraged to write about things and experiences they are familiar with. We will continue to give prompts for ideas in writing but if you have things at home that your child is excited or familiar with then use those. Writing a birthday card or an observation of flowers in the garden can produce amazing writing. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Read every day! Reading benefits from daily practice and making sure you read every day will help to use the skills so that they become embedded. We encourage you to listen to your child read and give them the opportunity to fix any mistakes they make. Try saying "that didn't quite sound right" or "does that make sense" to prompt them to look again.
  Reading to your child is awesome as well. When we read to our learners it is a great chance to model fluency, good reading  behaviors and our love of reading.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Keep it short and sweet. 20 minutes is a great amount of time to spend on something. If you feel like your child is in the flow then let them keep at it for a little bit longer. Take some breaks between learning activities. Play a game together or go for a walk. 

I could go on forever but these should be a good place to start. Our home learning plans are a buffet where you can pick and choose as much as you can handle. Everyone is in a different situation so we want these to be accessible without causing too much stress. 

So I'll leave you with this : Have fun!

Celebrating 100 Days

Everyday maths is a really important part of our learning in Autahi. We are keen for our students to understand that maths is a useful and fascinating part of our lives, and that we use it every day.

Each morning, we revisit our class calendar. The calendar is full of rich opportunities for maths: number recognition, counting forwards and backwards, sequencing and place value (tens and ones) to name just a few.

We've also been counting how many days we've been at school. This week, we reached the magic number of 100.

Time for a celebration and to explore 100 in a bit more detail.

We were keen to find out what 100 looks like, so we all searched the classroom for objects that we had 100 of. 

We realised that, by grouping our objects in 10s, we could count them more easily. Some of us were able to count the groups of ten. Some can count in tens.

Our 'hundredth birthday at school' got us thinking about birthdays and so our Number Talk this week continued the theme of careful counting, and also estimating. Having a 'good guess' about how many there are builds children's number sense.

And we even found a cool book to share. Look out for this one in the school library.

We're hooked on 100 now, so you might find that your child is coming home wanting to count to and talk about one hundred. Perhaps these activities will inspire you for some maths activities at home, too.

Learning to be an Artist

 This week in Autahi we had an idea of a sketching activity that would help us practise our sketching and observation skills while having a bit of fun. 

Little did I know that I'd be taking the learning home with me...

To paint the whole picture the activity was to sketch your own face on a folded piece of paper and the to flip it over and have a friend sketch you. The objective was twofold, first how you see yourself and secondly how a friend sees you. This shows your interpretation as an artist and your friends interpretation. 

All artists have their own style and skills and through this we see that every artist is different. 

So to demonstrate this point I had to create an image to share as an example. I love to draw myself so there were no problems there for me. But I needed a willing subject to sketch me back. So I took my paper and sketching pencil home and asked my partner if she would sketch me. 

After much giggling, discussion over the size of my ears and complaints that I didn't tell her we could use shading, we finally had an example to share with Autahi. I realised that I had never really seen her draw a picture before (Unfortunately she has seen many pictures that I have drawn). But it was a great experience in getting to see each other as artists.

So here is what went on in Autahi as we took up the challenge to sketch each other and learn to see ourselves as artists.