Warming up for our new inquiry

Once upon a time, in a school not so far from here, there was a class called Autahi who loved stories. Each time the children gathered together for a chat, or rest, or a snack, they always asked to be read a story. And when the story ended, they would call out, "Another story, please!" Many of the children also liked to find story books to enjoy during choosing time, or made up stories when they played with their friends. 

Truly, Autahi was a room full of stories. Luckily, the teachers in Autahi loved stories as much as the children. So, they agreed that Autahi should begin a quest to explore some of the many ways that stories can be told, through drawing, writing, speaking, drama, film-making, puppetry ... so many wonderful possibilities.

And so began the tale of Autahi's latest Inquiry ...

Yes, our Inquiry in Autahi is about ways to tell stories. At Worser Bay School, we use an Inquiry cycle to help us to map our inquiry learning. It looks like this:

We are just at the very beginning of this cycle. In fact, we're almost in a pre-inquiry stage, where we're fuelling up our inquiry by reading and exploring lots of different fairytale stories. These are stories that most of us already know well, but can be told in many different ways. We are experiencing some of these different retellings, thinking about the characters, making art, building and making, and doing some of our own writing, too. This week, we have begun exploring Jack and the Beanstalk. Here we are, building a beanstalk for Jack (and we'll be planting some beans this week, too).

From these early experiences, we will begin to consider what questions we have about how these stories can be told. We will find some new ways to tell these stories ourselves and - really important - share them other people.

Keep an eye on the Blog and Seesaw as we move through our Inquiry process and share our learning and stories with you. And do ask your child to tell you the stories they are learning at school.

Last Blog Post of 2021

 Wow! What another amazing year at Worser Bay. Here are some highlights...

And something from the staff...

The Year 6 item...

Anyone for tennis (or soccer)?

This week, we all joined a tennis taster session, and some us us also had the chance to try some soccer. It can take Bravery to take the plunge and try something new, and it was great to see our Autahi children responding with Zest to the challenge.

On Monday, in beautiful sunshine, we welcomed Vojdan from Miramar Tennis Club. Vojdan coached us in some tennis basics, working on our coordination and beginning to control at tennis ball with a racket. It was fun - and a great challenge - to balance the ball on our rackets or take a tennis ball for a controlled 'walk', using a racket to roll it along.

Later in the week, we had a visit from Maia from Capital Football. Maia is keen to get more girls in Wellington involved in soccer. All the Autahi girls had the chance to try out some soccer skills with Maia with chasing, ball control and goal-scoring games. There was a lot of Zest and Love of Learning in our group. 

Look out for more sports opportunities at school for your child as we go into 2022.

Seasons: our new inquiry

This term, we've embarked on a brand new inquiry into the seasons of the year.

In this blog, you'll get a taste of how our thinking has evolved so far, and some background to some of the ideas that our Autahi students might be asking you about at home. I'm also going to try to give you a sense of how Inquiry learning works in our space.

Here is our inquiry model. You have probably seen it on our classroom walls. Sometimes an inquiry can take us around the cycle a few times.

We begin with 'I am curious'.

This is a questioning and wondering phase of the cycle. Sometimes questions arise spontaneously from children's interests. Sometimes, we try to give the children experiences to pique their curiosity. For this inquiry, we went to the theatre to see the show 'Seasons'.

After the show, we did lots of chatting and retelling about our favourite parts of the show. We talked about what we know about the seasons. We thought about the weather.

And also about the different creatures at different times of the year, like Tui laying their eggs in spring - and spiders (the enormous, hairy spider in the show was a big hit!).

We began to collect and share our questions about the seasons and add them to our inquiry wall. Lots of people are interested in the sun, for example.

We know that there will be more questions to add as we learn more.

We realised that we all mostly know that there are four seasons in New Zealand but we're not totally sure about how nature changes in each one. We did some seasons art to help us to think some more about this problem. 

We started exploring our current season, Spring, by doing some planting and growing.

We also went down to our beach to see what nature is doing at the seaside right now, and we've been sketching hedgerow plants from around our school.

We have also begun to respond to some of those questions about the sun, for example who made it and what is it made from? Why is it hotter in some seasons and cooler in others? Here we are having a go at some fiery sun art.

Our questioning and exploring phase continues, and you might find that your child comes home with some questions and ideas prompted by our topic. Ask them about what we've been doing at school and have a chat about their thoughts. Please do feed back to Beth and Carl as we'd love to follow up their wonderings at school, too. That way, we can all live this rich inquiry topic!

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.