The tamariki in Aotahi Studio have been doing an excellent job demonstrating positive behaviour, active listening, and showing our school values every day. We are incredibly proud of the way they support one another, follow routines, and approach their learning with enthusiasm. As a result of their collective efforts, the class has enjoyed several exciting reward and enrichment activities this term.

A highlight was celebrating the filling of our star jar with a classroom disco! The tamariki worked together to earn stars through positive choices, teamwork, and respectful behaviour. Once the jar was full, we turned up the music and enjoyed a fun-filled celebration. It was wonderful to see the children dancing, laughing, and celebrating their achievement together.

As part of our investigations learning, the tamariki created fantastic blow-paint aliens. Using straws to blow paint across the page, they experimented with different techniques before transforming their creations into imaginative alien characters. The activity encouraged creativity, problem-solving, and plenty of conversation as the children shared ideas and admired each other’s unique designs.

We have also been exploring shadows through a range of hands-on activities. The tamariki enjoyed creating shadow puppets and discovering how different hand positions could make a variety of shapes and characters. We then took our learning outdoors, where the children worked together to trace each other’s shadows with chalk. This sparked great discussions about light, shape, and how shadows change throughout the day.

These experiences have been a wonderful way to celebrate the positive learning culture the tamariki have helped create in Aotahi Studio. We look forward to continuing to recognise and reward their fantastic efforts while providing opportunities for creativity, exploration, and fun.

This term in Aotahi Studio, we have enjoyed exploring two wonderful stories: The Gruffalo and Owl Babies. Through these books, we have been developing our reading, speaking, listening, and creative thinking skills.

The Gruffalo:

After reading The Gruffalo, we used our imaginations to design our very own Gruffalo characters. We thought carefully about what made our creatures unique and used adjectives to describe them. We came up with lots of exciting words to help our readers picture our Gruffalos, such as furry, spiky, enormous, colourful, and fierce. It was fun sharing our creations and seeing how different everyone’s Gruffalo was.

Owl Babies:

We also enjoyed reading Owl Babies and learning about the three baby owls as they waited for their mother to return. To bring the story to life, we worked together in small groups to act out the story using puppets. We practised speaking clearly, taking turns, and showing expression as we performed in front of the class. It was exciting to become the characters and retell the story through drama.

These activities helped us build our confidence, creativity, and communication skills while having fun with some much-loved stories. We are looking forward to discovering more books and sharing our learning through reading, writing, and drama throughout the year.

In Aotahi Studio, we have been working hard to grow our writing skills and become more confident writers. We have been learning how to write full sentences by remembering to use capital letters at the beginning, spaces between words, and full stops at the end. We are becoming more independent and proud of the writing we can create.

One of our favourite writing activities was creating our own Gruffalo characters. We used interesting adjectives to describe what our creatures looked like and to make our writing more exciting for our readers. We had lots of fun using our imaginations and thinking of creative words to bring our characters to life.

We have also been learning how to write book reviews. After reading stories, we shared our opinions about what we liked, our favourite parts, and whether we would recommend the book to others. This helped us think more deeply about the books we read and practise sharing our ideas through writing.

Another exciting topic was researching and writing reports about planets. We learned fascinating facts about our chosen planets and organised our information into clear reports. We worked on using facts, headings, and topic-specific vocabulary to teach others about what we had discovered.

We are proud of the progress we have made as writers this term. It has been wonderful to see our confidence grow as we share our ideas, use new vocabulary, and create a variety of different pieces of writing. We look forward to continuing our writing journey and sharing more of our work with you.

In Aotahi Studio, we have been busy learning lots of new maths skills! We have been exploring patterns by finding, creating, and extending repeating patterns using colours, shapes, blocks, and other materials. We enjoyed working together to spot what comes next and creating our own patterns for our friends to solve.

We have also been learning about more and less. We compared groups of objects and talked about which groups had more, fewer, or the same amount. These activities helped us think carefully about numbers and quantities.

Another area we have been working on is addition. We have been using counters, cubes, ten frames, and our fingers to help us solve addition problems. We are becoming more confident at adding numbers together and explaining how we worked out our answers.

We have enjoyed investigating capacity through hands-on activities. We made predictions, filled containers, and compared how much different containers could hold. It was fun to discover that some containers could hold much more than we expected!

We have also been learning about partitioning numbers and working with numbers to 20. We explored different ways to break numbers apart and put them back together again. This has helped us understand how numbers work and has strengthened our number knowledge.

We are proud of all the learning we have done so far and look forward to sharing more of our maths adventures with you throughout the year!

During Term 1 in Aotahi, we explored yoga on CRT with Islay. We practiced different stretching poses that followed a story and tried partner yoga with a buddy. We learned how to use our breathing to calm down, and we looked at managing different emotions.

In Term 2, our learning has shifted to the human body. We are now making connections to what we discovered during our yoga sessions!

Ka pai tō mahi, Aotahi!

Yesterday during CRT with Islay and Caroline, we became bone experts! Did you know that a human body has 206 bones, and 27 of them are just in your hand? We learned how bones keep us strong and how to look after them. To celebrate our learning, we traced our hands to make awesome ‘high five hands’ to share with each other. We also put our teamwork skills to the test by building a full human skeleton puzzle. It was so fun figuring out exactly where each bone belonged!

While the seniors were away, we continued our ‘Fun Friday’ with an in-studio Choice and Challenge. The studio favourite was our get creative/messy area where we left the floor covered in glitter and everyone with a smile, showing how creative we could be with glitter, glue and a lot of colour!

We have had a lovely week getting to know each other and our surroundings at school. Together, we have gone on adventures around the school to see where we can play and what we can do there. Here are some photos of some adventures we went on in week 2!

This term we have been taking ACTION! by learning about the people who help us in an emergency. This week our focus was on the people who help us when there is a fire and what we should do. We were lucky enough to get a special visit from a local fire-person and even got to get up nice and close to a FIRE TRUCK! Here is a song we performed at the assembly about how to ‘Get Out, Stay Out!’ if there is a fire.