Tuakana Teina--working across the school

This week we spent some time working across the school in our whanau groups.  This is a wonderful opportunity to get to work with other teachers and with kids of all ages across the school.  It gives us a chance to be leaders and big buddies and to work in different spaces.

This time we were all learning about the story of Ngake and Whataitai--the taniwha of Wellington harbour and how relevant they are to our location here at Worser Bay.  We learned a different version of the story that looks at the taniwha and each of their strengths.  Each group explored these ideas through different ways.  Some did collaborative art, team building exercises, and viewing the locations in the harbour that relate to the story from our local lookout.  

Sketching - Gearing up for the Arts Celebration

 

We are gearing up for our Arts Celebration. As part of our Inquiry rotations, we are learning to sketch. In this session, we sketched people in lots of different ways. Some examples are that we used '1000 lines,' sketched with our non-dominant hand, sketched people upside down, we used different mediums and looked closely at people's faces. Ask us about this at home... 

Whānau Day - Tāne and the Baskets of Knowledge

On Friday, we had our first whānau day of the year. This is an opportunity for mixed groups working together across the school and fostering Tuakana-teina Positive Relationships. Tuakana-teina is a concept from te ao Māori. It refers to the relationship between an older (tuakana) person and a younger (teina) person. It is when an older or more expert tuakana (brother, sister or cousin) helps and guides a younger or less expert teina. These roles can be reversed at any time as we see some of our younger students as leaders.

In our groups, we learnt the story of Tāne and the Baskets of Knowledge. We expressed our learning in lots of different ways. Ask us what we learnt...

Here is the story of Tāne

Welcome to 2023!

We're back! Settling into the new year and developing positive relationships amongst the group was our focus for the first few days. We have focused on the strengths of Teamwork and manaakitanga. 

Soon, we will be launching into an Inquiry investigating our local marine environments. We will be helping to trial and develop a programme in conjunction with Worser Bay Boat Club, Otago University Marine Science department and others. The programme is called Moana Mana and will involve a lot of hands-on learning in the intertidal zone as well as research and experimentation in the classroom. We are very excited to have the opportunity to work alongside real scientists and to have a positive impact on our environment. Year 5-6 students will also have snorkelling opportunities as well as some sailing connected with this learning.

Alongside this will be an Arts project whose purpose is to mark our school site as the former Whetūkairangi Pā. We will be working with artist in residence, Kimi Moana Whiting up until June, by which time we will have some significant sculptural pieces completed. Again, we will be looking to the natural world for inspiration.

Christmas Zine

We have continued to pump up visual literacy. We know that our students enjoy to present their learning in different ways. Visual literacy has been a way to engage and motivate many of our students to communicate their ideas in creatively. This week, we made a Christmas Zine. It was wonderful to see the quality of the work produced. 

Ethan Q: On Wednesday the 7th of December we made a Christmas Zine in one day and it had 11 pages. First we all started on doing some doodles, word search and comics so it took us about to morning tea to get about half way done. It was very fun. After morning tea we kept on going until we finished and we all moved onto do different things. We made a word search for a song, an odd one out and many more things and stapled it together and there were awards for teamwork, creativity and encouragement and we got the award for teamwork. We managed to finish it at the end of the day. It was very fun and we named it 'Crazy Christmas.' Our group were Ethan.Q, Tui, Marcia, Samuel, Scarlett and Alice.

Art with Chloe and Dominique

 We are really grateful that Chloe (Arthur's mum) and Dominique (Arthur's grandma) came in to do this beautiful Art with us. 

We got a white canvas and covered it in white paint. We got 3 colours and squirted them in a line from one corner to another corner. We got a straw and blew the paint on the line. We left them to dry and they got varnished. This is our Art. By Tommy