We had a visit from St John. We learnt how to help in emergencies. First we learned how to dial for help by pressing 111. Then we had to learn which services we need to ask for: fire, ambulance or police.
It is important to know what kind of help we might need. It is important that we learn our parents' cell phone numbers so please help us to practise at home.
Then we learned how to bandage people in case they have an injury. We learned how to apply the bandage and also unroll the cover slowly and carefully. We got to practise on each other so we can be confident if we ever need to do it ourselves. We feel much more confident knowing what to do and how to dial for help!
Thank you St John's!
New Zealand Shakeout
The New Zealand ShakeOut, our national earthquake drill and tsunami hīkoi, took place last week on Thursday 28 October at 9:30am.
This term we will have a big focus on Positive Health. Our Inquiry is called, "Healthy Body, Healthy Mind?"
Our Inquiry will involve the Science of the cardiovascular system, healthy eating and learning about the importance of sleep and, of course, being active. We will be keeping a Health Journal, collecting personal data, goals, etc. We hope also that this intersects with some Positive Purpose, doing good for others and giving back in some way. Our students will be leading what this will look like.
The Institute of Positive Education, Geelong Grammar School says that "Health is a cornerstone of a holistic model of positive
education. Within the model, health is defined as
practising sustainable habits for optimal physical and
psychological health that are developed from a sound
knowledge base. Evident by this definition is the notion
that health consists of multiple components and that
complete health is achieved when a person is physically,
mentally, socially, and emotionally well." Read more in the Positive Health Literature Review.
We are using the “SPIRE” acronym to help us to set goals.
Spiritual Well-being: Leading a meaningful and moral life and living mindfully, while contributing to the greater good.
Physical Well-being: Cultivating a healthy body through exercise, nutrition, and adequate rest and recovery.
Intellectual Well-being: Acquiring knowledge, engaging in rigorous scholarship, cultivating creativity, and fostering the love of learning.
Relational Well-being: Contributing to, and in turn, benefiting from other people by focusing on the role that the person plays in his or her social environment.
Emotional Well-being: Increasing one’s ability to experience pleasurable emotions while acquiring the resilience necessary to effectively deal with painful emotions.
This is our initial session on "energy." This is based on extensive research by David Keane:
We have started our Health Journals. We are measuring our improved fitness over time. We have initial data from a beep test.
We will also monitor and track data on across 4 exercises:
burpees
push ups
tricep dips
leg raises
We have put ourselves into fitness groups. Some of us will be pushing ourselves to our limits, while others prefer a more gentle exercise routine. This is the route we will either run, run/ walk or walk on a regular basis.
Zane: Yesterday I did my first health journal. I went down the hill saw my house then went up the zig zag. My legs started to hurt but I got to school. Haru helped me and I helped him We also did burpees, tricep dip push ups and leg raises.
Lisa: This week was real fun I really enjoyed doing our run on Thursday my favourite activity afterwards was the leg lifts. I also enjoyed doing athletics I came around five or six on most of them my favourite one was long jump
Ethan B: We had to put ourselves into groups from four to one. Four is like you will do walking and you don't really want to run. Group one is like you really like running and you're fast. I put myself into group two and we went for a pretty big run it was quite hard but it wasn't super, super hard.Then when we came back we did a lot of exercise. We did tricep dips and they were quite hard but to me they weren't the hardest thing that we did. We also did leg ups they were probably the hardest to me. We also did burpees they actually might have been the other hardest one to me. They were really hard and doing the push ups in them were really hard. Then we did push ups and they were still very hard.
Petra: I found the fitness test REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hard. It was EXHAUSTING! First, we did a run down to the beach. We didn't go to the beach though. We didn't cross the road to the beach. We kept walking to a pedestrian only path with white hand railings that zigzagged up. After we finally got back to school, We did lots and lots of exercise. We did Burpees, Tricep Dips, Push Ups, and Leg ups. I was EXHAUSTED afterwards.
Fabian: We had to a big run to the beach and up the zig-zag way. After we did tricep dips, push ups, burpees and leg raises. I used my legs and arms and I have to work on my tricep dips.
Charlotte: I found the fitness challenge hard after doing it for a long time but
it was kind-of fun.
We did tricep dips, running, push ups, leg raises and burpees.
It was kind-of hard because we did twenty tricep dips and ten of
the rest and then we did all of them for one minute each.
I used my upper body muscles.
Ikigai is Japanese concept meaning 'reason for being' it falls under the Positive Purpose domain in Positive Education. Research by Sone et al. (2008) studied over 40,000 participants and found that being able to articulate your ikigai had huge benefits to well-being. The most interesting one to us being leading a longer life! Sounds pretty good!
This week we have started to explore what are the things we love? What does the world need? We have been encouraging students to think deeply here beyond cats, video games and food! Although all important!
We have launched into our new Inquiry this week, exploring in equal parts wellbeing and the things we feel passionate about. or the things we consider to be issues. Learning to think about the latter involves asking the questions which will help us to explore the issues in more depth.The Philosophy for Children (P4C) framework invites us to think about issues with some structure.
We began today looking at issues of poverty and homelessness using Maurice Sendak's book 'We are all in the dumps With Jack and Guy', an extrardinary work. Like 'Where the Wild Things Are', it looks at big issues through children's eyes.
Our junior philosophers have done some great thinking to explore the book and the ideas within it. Here are some of their thoughts below.
On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, we opened up the school as an Art Gallery. It was wonderful to share our Art with our whānau.
Maggie: I liked how Autahi used a toy that was special to them. They also did a thing where you could make a face out of some of their play stuff. I liked how Tautoru used music. Fabian: I really liked the art from Matariki because it had a really good carving of the north island of New Zealand and I liked that they had little clay characters and they are gonna make a little stop motion movie. I liked the art from the little kids because they did photos of they themselves and made a background.
Sabine: My favourite piece of art in autahi was the ones where they took photos of themselves with their favourite toys and then made them into collages. They made it look a whole lot more abstract with what they put on their art. My favourite piece in tautoru was their music and beats I thought it was really cool the way they made the beat and rhythm and different sounds and their method of keeping the beat and time and when to actually play their instruments. My favourite piece of art in Matariki was the floating inspiration books they were really interesting and abstract the way they put them up. I also liked the spinning tops I thought the illusion was really cool.
Sophie: I liked the way Autahi did lots of different ideas of one style of art and my favourite style of art was the one were you could touch it and play around with it. I liked it so much because it was different to the normal idea of art which is to hang it up or do something like that and then you can’t touch it. I liked the way Tautoru also did one style of art in different ways, I also liked how they learnt about music and how to read their own little sheet of it. My favourite part about Tautoru’s art was watching them put all that work into learning about music because it was really cool watching them making music.
Luca S: When I walked into Matariki, I was overwhelmed with amazing art, it was so cool to see the finished product of all their art, i had seen a tiny bit of their art in the process but it was still so cool seeing the finished products. I am very proud of my art that I did this year and I have put in a lot of work, same as lots of other people, my stop-motion is one of the things I am most proud of because it started off as and idea, now it is a meaningful short clip.
This is our Matariki Māhutonga movie with some of our poems and some of our stop motion.
Mae S: In tautoru, I liked the greeting art. It was very tidy and colourful, and I liked the way they included Maori things in their art celebration. The tree that was next to them I thought was cool- with all the fairy lights and such. Overall their art celebration was very nice. I think Tautoru did an amazing job and worked VERY hard on it! I think that they did lots of hard mahi!
Addison: I loved how Autahi put play and art together and I thought that their art was pretty abstract. I loved how Tautoru made art of their own faces and the things that they loved and I think that was pretty creative.
Will: Visiting the Autahi and Tautoru art was actually really cool. It was very different to our art, and it was quite interesting too. Autahi’s art was about self portraits and faces. They made faces out of toys and lego, took pictures of themselves with their special toys, and sketched the photos. They all drew self portraits, and got their friends to do them as well. There was also a half and half game, where they would fold the paper over and do one side of the face each. They also did pop art collages in the corridor as well. The art in Tautoru was about the students introducing themselves. They took selfies (not like you would take a selfie though) and printed them out in a black and white filter. That way they could colour it in and it would be realistic and colourful. They also made art about what they enjoyed doing, what they liked, and some things about themselves. There was also a section with pop art including the words “Ko ***student’s name*** Au”, in messed around and jumbled up letters. They also made a lot of music and beat, to perform together in a group.
Nicolas: I enjoyed it, Autahi blew my mind! And Tautoru too! How are they doing this?! I really enjoyed going to look at the senior art too!
Sam M: This term I enjoyed the Art Celebration. It was fun to learn about the process and meaning of art. It was fun learning how to control paint. Before I didn't really know how to paint and I would rush and complete it in a day. I believe I have improved my skill of painting. I liked doing the Marc Chagall painting the most. I was really happy with the shading and look of my painting but I still can improve. During the Art Celebration I really liked working with my friends. I enjoyed making wire characters and objects and finding funny ways to arrange them then we made a stop motion movie with them. It was great seeing it projected in Māhutonga.
On Friday, we went to the ASB. We played Netball, Ki-o-rahi, ultimate frisbee and we had fun on the inflatables. We appreciate the opportunity and are very grateful to the awesome coaches! We had a great time.
On Tuesday, we welcomed some top coaches from Netball New Zealand to give us a taster netball coaching session. Ask your child about it: there are opportunities to get involved in netball at our school.
It was really fun and we got to play netball against each other. We practised and learnt new skills.
