After a warm up of buzz, I used the abacus to revisit 10 and...... (teen facts) as the teacher had explained that the children were quite confident with these facts. We then compared some teen numbers and ty numbers and what they look like on the abacus ie 12 & 20, 13 &30, 14 & 40, 15 & 50.

Jets making connections between finger patterns and sets of objects
10 fingers is the same as 10 bears
7 fingers is the same as 7 beans
3 fingers is the same as 3 dice

Then moving onto
8 fingers is the same as 8 bears is the same as 8 counters on a tens frame

Writing and maths in Rata

While working in Rata and with support from the teacher I had clear ideas and expectations for the writing and maths lessons.
After interval with the children on the mat and the Walt written on the white board (we are learning to start our sentence with a capital letter and read our story so we know what comes next)
I started with My cat likes to..... children brainstormed ideas (ideas recorded these on the white board) so our sentence became My cat likes to sleep in the sun. To enhance the sentence we brainstormed again this time focusing on descriptive words so then our sentence became My big fluffy cat likes to sleep in the sun.
Leaving the Walt in place, children were given two pictures of cats  (the higher group were able to work independently) while I work with the others I the mat, where I modeled what was happening in the pictures ie a kitten had found a ball of wool and in the next picture the kitten is tangled in the wool, these children then chose their own prompts and I supported them with the writing process. As I was in this class the following day I was able to get the children to read through their work, reading to see if it made sense,had they used capitals, full stops and spaces between their words.

Staff meeting

An interesting presentation from Ana about the Ministry of Education revised  e-asttle writing complete with online video  explanations. This online tool is designed to assess childrens' writing progress from years  1- 10 by providing a variety of communicative purposes ie describe, explain, recount, narrate persuade. A valuable tool with quality exemplars to track student writing.

Amber and Roz spoke about GGL and showed a tracking graph (which was informative as I had little knowledge of what happened from the form being filled out and the child spoken to, nice to have the elaboration)

Pirates in Tawa

We started our morning brainstorming what the children thought a pirate looked like or what he/she (no one thought there was any girl pirates) does  (this was used to engage prior knowledge). After this was completed I read a poem describing what a pirate is/does from this we we're able to confirm the prior knowledge we had and extend with what we didn't know.

Later I shared Jolly Roger and the treasure  (yellow) with the class the children got to colour and decorate their treasure chest and write a simple sentence (modeled and sounded out a simple sentence on the white board).
Later in the day we made our own stuffed pirate

Staff blogging session

After a fantastic day in Tawa at James Street school pleased to join my colleagues at Junior syndicate meeting :) to plan and inform of what was coming for the rest of term one. Then to spend some much needed discussion and time assessing our blogs    

  

Professional development

Recap of 2 days pd
Day one Staff Hauroa
A very informative day with Denise who has a very sound holistic approach to hauroa and encouraging self examination
Taught us skills for letting go of previous 2014 negatives and carrying forward the positives 😀

Denise encouraged us to keep our stories short  (Which I personally will find very challenging as I can be all about the details 😐)

Among other skills shared was allowing ourselves to develop as active listener's to have the ability not to step in and take on or take over someone else's problem
or give a solution that might not be appropriate from another's point of view and actually is not what is being asked for.

We finished our day discussing how we relate to ourselves and others and building our integrity ☺

Day two
Robyn RTLB discussed  functional behavior
"What you focus on grows" how about growing the self belief

M = SE × V
Motivation equals self ethics x value
Not just from a child's point of view, l'm pretty sure we all approach a task thinking like this ie
What am I able to do
What is the value of what I am doing
Gives the motivation to complete

From a teacher prospective remembering to check in, making sure they can do the task  (thank you to Ana for sharing your knowledge to give me tools for an easy check in system, thumbs-up, thumbs -half way, thumbs -down)

And something for me to remember is the presenting problem is seldom the real problem ☺

Art in Kowhai

A busy day based on the book Taniwha by  Robyn Kahukiwa with handwriting, shared story, brainstorms, writing and maths lessons we decided we would draw a large Taniwha. All the children helped decide how long and wide we would make our Taniwha,with everyone participating in sketching the outline and how we were going to decorate and add our own patterning to our Taniwha.