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.

Visual Maths

During Number Talks, students develop Mathematical language and skills by engaging in each other’s strategies. When we learn Maths we develop understanding through visual models - these are mental pictures that explain a particular idea or concept. This helps all students to access the learning where they are at. A visual model can be as simple as a using the slices of a cake to represent fractions, but they can explain some pretty complex ideas in advanced Maths too.

Showing children 'quick images' and asking them how many they see is one way of developing subitising. An alternative way of developing conceptual subitising is to show children a number of dots and ask them to say how they see the number.

Number Frog and the Number Line: Most young learners are introduced to the number line at age 5 or 6. It's a valuable visual model for progressing learners from counting one by one with their fingers towards memory recall of their number facts.

Arrays: When learners first encounter multiplication they are usually introduced to Arrays. Arrays are great because they also explain why it doesn't matter which way round the numbers go in multiplication. E.G. In the case above you can see that four rows of six is the same as six rows of four - which explains why 4 x 6 is the same as 6 x 4 - otherwise known as the commutative law.

The Hundred Square/ Number Spider and Number Fly: allows learners to create patterns out of ideas in Maths.

 We can draw to help us to solve mathematical problems

New Zealand Garden Bird Survey

We joined together with Autahi this week to take part in the New Zealand Garden Bird Survey. We love being leaders and learning alongside each other. It's great to hear the wonderful ideas of our friends across the school

The New Zealand Garden Bird Survey takes place between 26 June and 4 July 2021. It’s a fantastic reason to spend time outdoors, and you’ll be doing your bit for science.

Healthy bird populations can indicate that the environment is healthy. We know lots about endangered native birds in the bush, but we don’t always know what’s happening in the populations of all the birds around us, particularly in urban and garden environments.

Find out more here

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.

Whanau Day: Anna and Susie's Group

On Friday the whole school split into Whanau groups to explore some of the Character Strengths we talk about daily at school.

Susie and Anna's Whanau group explored the Character Strengths of:

-Leadership

-Teamwork

-Curiosity

-Prudence

-Self-Regulation

Throughout the day we worked in small groups to unpack each strength. Some of us read picture books about the strengths and did role plays. 

Some of us had challenges or scavenger hunts to help us find out more about the strengths. We all worked together to contribute ideas and help each other understand the Characters Strengths better.

Our aim for the day was to create a collaborative piece of artwork to represent the Character Strength we were focusing on. Each piece of Character Strength art will be put together to make a display for us to use in each space across the school.

Our Whanau group was lucky enough to have two very talented artists from our community share some advice on important things to think about when creating a piece of art.

Check out our amazing artwork. Thanks so much to all our wonderful parents who came to help run workshops.

Collaborative Art in Learning Groups

Today we found out who is in our new learning groups. We had a challenge to create a collaborative piece of artwork unpacking the learner attribute of "I am Connected."

We have been getting familiar with the Collaboration Matrix and using this to reflect on our group work.

Eastern Zones Cricket Tournament

It was a pleasure to take all of our Year 5 and 6 students to the Eastern Zones Cricket Tournament. They showed a range of character strengths.

This Year we will be focusing on the idea of Power. Our students have been adding to this Padlet to say how they showed their power during the cricket. 

Inquiry challenges

We are exploring invention and innovation in inquiry at the moment. Yesterday we completed some BP challenges (http://www.starters.co.nz/bpchallenge-index.html) to tune in to what we could invent or innovate. We were trying to create a stretcher that could carry a classmate, a marble run so our marble could hit a target and a "picker" to remove a ball from a high, unstable place.

Have a look at some of the photos of us creating and exploring:


Inquiry challenges from Matariki on Vimeo.