Play at Worser Bay

We are incredibly lucky that despite our small size we have an amazingly rich environment for play. The courts for football and scootering, the trees for forts , reading and dreaming and all the nooks for hiding, and imagining. Creativity is on display where ever we look, invention and problem solving working in real time. This is of course, learning. Our juniours are capturing this as part of their programme on Mondays and this acknowledges the benefits of play. Play is thinking and discovery. On top of this is all of the amazing social learning which takes place in the playground. If you have the opportunity when you are next in the playground see if you can notice what is happening about you, in the spaces squeezed between corners, amongst the gardens and most astonishingly, in the trees.

What's happening in Māhutonga Matariki?

By Mae, Anastasiya and Emily

We are focusing on quite a lot of things, one of many would be art. For art we are focusing on Marc Chagall's work. We are getting inspired by his work and turning it into our own art. Another thing that we are hugely focusing on is Inquiry. We are doing our own inquiries about New Zealand's history and digging deeper into our history. We are trying to think like historians and see different perspectives.

Everything we are learning at the moment is hard but while we are struggling our brain is growing and developing. Don't ever forget your brain grows no matter what age! We are learning to not give up if we make a mistake. By trying again or fixing it, we all agree that this is a crucial part of learning, and we respect our learning a lot. We also think it’s important to remember to express our feelings and ideas through art!

 Art: 

We have been making at inspired by Marc Chagall here are some examples of his work:

 

We made backgrounds,  added objects and people. We are learning to use only a limited amount of paint. We use white paint to build up a shadow with white paint before adding colour which helps develop the shadow to make the colour more visible. We blend different colours depending on our background. For example if we had blue and green backgrounds then our figures would be red and yellow so they would pop and you would be able to see the objects better.

Art in progress!

Inquiry:

For our Inquiry we usually get to choose our subject, the teachers do give us some borders for our questions. We enjoy making interesting inquiries around lots of different subjects. At the moment we are doing Inquiry around NZ history, we talked to some people and asked them what they are doing for inquiry. Most people are doing things about Māori and when  Captain Cook came to NZ, We are learning to use keywords when we are finding information. 

Once we finish our research we will be writing an essay about what we have been learning about. The essays are conclusions on our research showing our knowledge about this subject. We develop our knowledge around this subject because we think that Māoridom is a big part of our history and we are always keen to learn more about it. Learning how to do essays will help us in later life during college and university. We enjoy doing essays because they challenge us. We enjoy doing this topic because it is interesting and we enjoy learning about our past.

Listening and Conversations for Learning

We have been focusing on "raising the bar." We are currently setting goals around our learning conversations. This links to our current Learner Attribute focus, "I am a Thinker!"

'Talk Moves' is a powerful tool for learning. Rich talk supports students to make sense of ideas and build a classroom community. This is something that we have been developing in all of our learning conversations. 

Talk Moves prompt:

• wait time
• turn and talk
• revoicing
• reasoning
• adding on
• repeating
• revise thinking.

During our circle time, we have been discussing what an active listener is. We are working hard to face the speaker, think about what the other person is saying and engaging in conversation. 

Why listening is so important? 

Our students said...

Listening is important because you need to get all of the information 

You might learn something new if you keep listening 

You might have forgotten something, listening might refresh your mind 

You might learn how to do something in a different way 

What stops us listening?

Our students said... 

The person talking next to you, even if you don't want to talk to them 

Toys on the mat 

Devices 

Noise in the classroom 

Something that is happening outside the window 

Thinking about stuff e.g. what is for lunch? 

Playing games 

Things on the walls 

What would you be doing if you were actively listening? 

Our students said...

You need to show that you are listening through body language

Focus on what they are saying 

Look at the person talking 

Face the person speaking 

Your brain is thinking 

Add on to the stuff they are saying 

Piggy backing 

Make connections 

Ask questions 

Interacting 

Active listening by sharing ideas 

Not letting someone else distract you 

Repeat what the person says 

Agree or disagree respectfully

What difference does this make for the other person/ people as opposed to someone half present?

Our students said... 

Multitasking is not good because you don't do anything well 

Do one thing at a time 

The person who is talking might feel sad, annoyed, disappointed or misheard

We need to uplift mana and show manaakitanga

These are our conversation guidelines

Interzones XC

"We did interzones! It was muddy. One of us lost our shoes in the bog and ran in just her socks. We worked hard."

Congratulations to these students for representing Worser Bay School at the Interzones Cross Country event. We are all very proud of you. What an amazing effort.

Worm Farm

 

We have cleaned out the old worm farm on top court! We cleaned it out and put in some new bedding making it all cosy and ready for some new residents in (thanks Christine for providing some of her wormy friends). 

The start or the project!

We found a family of snails on the bottom

All cleaned out

Preparing the bedding block

Christine's worms in their new home!

We found out lot's of fun facts while setting us our new 'cute' friends. For example, it's really important you don't touch worms because the chemicals in our skin can 'burn' them! We are eager to educate our peers about this to make sure we can all get along and manage food waste together. 

Thanks Billy for creating this DOs and DON'Ts, a copy of these are in each of the spaces.

Our friends will soon be settled in enough to start feeding them. This will be another thing we can show leadership in, while using the worm 'tea' and 'poo' in our beautiful gardens.

Eastern Zones Cross Country 2021

Year 5 Girls

We arrived at the Scot’s field. Everyone wanted to eat but it was too bad for the year fours because...

World war 2 all over again, trampling all over each, a fight to get to the front. But before we tell that story...

First the year fours got called up to get warmed up for the race. My heart raced even though my race wasn’t for another hour. “Ready” said the man.

“GO!!” he shouted.

 

Year 6 Boys

Year 4 Boys

Year 6 Girls

Year 4 Girls

Worser Bay Team

Year 4 Boys line up

Our race was at Scots College. They have this amazingly massive green field of grass and I love it because there is some shade, lots of sun , some hills but mostly flat. We had to run three times around it and plus a little more because we had to get to the finish line which was not the same as the start line but a little further on. But I am glad that it was longer because some of the people in front of me were walking by the end and so I passed them but I wound not have if it was a little shorter because I passed them at the end.

Year 6 Boys

Year 6 Girls

Perseverance: I used perseverance when I kept going even though I was really really really tired and I felt like my throat was more dry than a sun dried lizard.

Bravery: I think that I used bravery even by just going to the event and I think that I also used bravery when I actually ran my hardest and did not walk. If I had walked I would probably not have felt so good about myself in the end. It was kind of scary because they said that if you walked then you would have to pull out and quit from the race because it would waste their time!

Art and Maths

'Many mathematicians draw upon Art and many artists draw upon Mathematics'.  says Jo Boaler (Maths Professor at Stanford University). We know that there is lots of beauty in Maths. 

We have been dialling up the Character Strength of Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence. 

VIA, Institute of Character: "Those who express an appreciation of beauty & excellence notice and appreciate beauty, excellence and/or skilled performance in all domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience".

Here are some examples of what we have been doing: 

The Numbers Give The Design

We wrote down a group numbers. Using squared paper, we started somewhere in the middle. We took each of the numbers in turn to tell us how long to draw the line and turn a right angle to the left after we drew each line.

Rotational Symmetry Art

The students created a simple drawing on 1/8 of their circle, then they transferred their drawing into all 8 parts of their circle. What a great way to learn about rotational symmetry, fractions and angles. 

Matariki Māhutonga City Gallery + Wellington Museum Trip

 We are so INSPIRED after our trip to the City Gallery and Wellington Museum.

City Gallery

We explored the latest exhibition called 'Every Artist'. We were curious about the messages/meaning behind the artwork and enjoyed trying to figure these out throughout the gallery.

We were particularly drawn to Emily Karaka's work which displayed her inspirations for her work. 

We also created our own books for a place to record our inspiration, which I'm sure will be filled soon! 

Wellington Museum

Learning about the history of Wellington/ NZ has been a focus recently. It is great to understand the formation of New Zealand with greater depth. 

'Understanding the mistakes of the past ensures we don't repeat them'  - Lillian 

At the museum we heard more about characters like the Wakefields as well as the sharing of history through the Te Ao Māori lens. We look forward to continuing this learning in the weeks to come.

Pi Investigation

We've been thinking about Pi. No, not pie. Not pai either! The mahi was tino pai though, and it did get us thinking about the size of certain pastries. 

We started off by thinking about how to visually calculate, or estimate, the area of a circle. Some great strategies were shared, for example finding the number of full squares then estimating the total area of part squares. This got us thinking... there must be a more accurate way!

   

So we followed our instructions, measuring and recording diameter and circumference (and learning what these are!). 

Then we were asked to divide our circumference by the diameter. This hovered around 3 point something no matter the size of the circle we had measured. Hmm..

We figured out that we could reverse the equation and multiply either the circumference or diameter by Pi to find the true measurement. We think our circumference measurement was probably a bit off because of the string. 

He tino PAI tō mahi pāngarau, koutou!