I've been having some technical difficulties over the last three weeks so have not been able to post to our blog. I am very thankful to the techie guys who have rescued my photos and restored my computer!
This post will share a few of the things we have been working on over the last three weeks.
Firstly, our big project is related to art.
We are learning about COLLABORATION and what this word means.
As our school is moving into the new ways of teaching and learning collaboration is a word we are all hearing a lot about and I felt it was important our children have some understanding of what this word means.
In our class we came up with this definition
Collaboration means working together to create something more than we could create if we worked alone.
We are working collaboratively to create a huge oak tree just like the oak tree at the heart of our school.
We began by asking our families help us collect lots of cardboard tubes - we have such great support from our families that we ended up with lots of tubes and two mums even went to Creative Junk for us to collect more!
Next we spent some time outside looking at the oak tree. We were particularly interested in the symmetry of the tree as we have been learning about symmetry during maths time. We spent some time talking about our tree being a symbol and what it represents in our school. We also spent time talking about our school values and what each of these means;
- excellence
- fun
- creativity
- initiative
- manaakitanga
- respect
- community
We then started to do lots and lots of painting of the cardboard tubes. This took lots of time. We were very lucky that Debbi was willing to collaborate with us as she used a hack saw to cut through lots of tubes for us. We also used craft knives for the tubes that were not too thick.
Becky kindly joined our team and drew an outline of the oak tree on the wall for us.
Next we started to glue all the tubes to the wall using the hot glue guns. This has proven to be lots of fun! (We even had to stand on a table to reach!).
We are still painting and gluing but our tree is really starting to take shape now.
Each of us has contributed to this project in small ways by painting and gluing the tubes - by adding them all together and collaborating our art project looks amazing!
Have a look at these photos for an overview of the process