Term 4 - Week 4 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tēnā koutou katoa,

We have carried over our focus from Week 3 into Week 4 'Curriculum & Inclusive Practices' as we continue to develop our curriculum, and creatively design our collaborative action plans for enacting our vision. We have also begun to prepare ourselves for our trip to Christchurch coming up in Week 5.

Communicative...  

Thank you so much to the parents who attended the Curriculum Whanau Focus Group on Tuesday. It was such an awesome opportunity to get to hear your awesome ideas and opinions on what we can do as a school.
An extra thank you to parents who offered resources/contacts to anything that can be of benefit to Matua Ngaru. We really look forward to strengthening this community relationship.

The leadership team would also like to thank the families who came to our 'Curiosity Quencher' session to learn more about our school.  It was a wonderful opportunity to connect with members of our community.

As part of our emerging curriculum work, we worked together to ideate and design what the various pedagogical approaches would look like in action and then on Wednesday we all choose which pedagogical approaches we would like to share and design on our curriculum website. We are excited that the input from our whanau aligns with our emerging curriculum design and have some exciting new ideas to weave throughout. We look forward to to sharing our final product with the community.

Creative...   

This week we have been working on getting our curriculum programmes up and running. We divvied up our action plans an each learning coach is leading and contributing immensely. We have allocated these out so that each member of our team can work on areas they are most passionate about. We have lots of exciting ideas to implement for next year.

We have also begun our device procurement for 2019 and have been working alongside New Era IT who will be our technical support provider in 2019.  We are excited to use a variety of powerful devices and digital technologies in creative ways within our future focused kura.

Collaborative...
On Thursday we had Spotless, our property management team, come in and go through

some training with us. It was lovely to also be joined by some of our Arohanui Special School
team. We are really looking forward to working with them more closely.

Through our Spotless training we got to know some of the quirks and exciting features of our school. We are looking forward to continuing our positive and collaborative relationship with them.

As a team we have had time to discuss what we want our Home - School Partnership to look like, sound like and feel like. We ideated how we would get everyone involved and feel welcome. We also looked into the idea of narrative assessments and how we can use our Linc Ed Ubiquitous Learning Pathways to flip learning and assessment @MatuaNgaru.

In other news, we worked together to co-construct our role descriptions for 2018-2019.  
This was an empowering process that provided us with some clarity within our 'greenfields'
situation. And we had some great bonding time this week with our first team photo. We
certainly felt a sense of belonging to our #DreamTeam with everyone wearing our Matua
Ngaru shirts and a crazy hat.

Curious... 

On Tuesday we got to visit the stunning Garden School in Manurewa. We were absolutely blown away by the awesome systems and homely environment. All of the staff and learners at the Garden School were enthusiastic, which was great to observe, especially after all the tough challenges of unsafe buildings they have been faced with along the way. We were impressed to learn that 19 of the staff participated in the Mindlab Post Graduate Diploma programme together. A real committment to staff professional learning and providing time to develop their approaches.

We definitely got lots of ideas that we can implement at Matua Ngaru School. Thank you for your hospitality! :)


On Tuesday afternoon the Learning Coaches worked together at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. As a staff we got to further explore Minecraft with the experts who attended the workshop in Week 3. There was lots of perseverance involved and new learning. We are looking forward to using Minecraft as a learning tool. We also spent time working on our Self Directed, Gamified, Badging Induction extravaganza of learning. We are all learning so much, collaborating and creating amazing artefacts that we can use with our learners in our kura to help uncover the cultural narrative and foster learning with digital technologies.

This week we also looked into UDL (Universal Design for Learning) with Kirstin and Wendy. A very powerful way to have our team visualise how to employ the principles of UDL was to embark on the challenge of designing a menu for a dinner party for 30 guests with many, varied, dietary requirements. Check out our sketchnote  for key ideas we discussed and activities we completed.

Our BEAUTIFUL school - site update!!

Our curiosity continued as the remaining Learning Coaches and John the Principal from Huapai School were able to get the latest viewing of our school construction site. Kate and Michael were especially excited by all the maker spaces available. Anoushka loved the garden outside and the outdoor music equipment, which is part of the sensory playground. We can't wait to visit our kura more in the coming weeks and the expected handover remains as December 10 - fingers and toes are crossed!

Coming up:

• Educators visits to South Island Schools
• Effective Educator Matrix drafting
• Learning Model drafting
• Collaborative Practices work with Amy
• Whanau Focus Group - Te Reo and Tikanga Wednesday 21 November
• and....we hope to see you at the:

Community Consultation Evening - Nov 22, 2019

Come meet the Crew at Matua Ngaru - 
A get together for 2019 New Entrants on Nov 29, 2019