Our focus for Week 3 has been based around developing our curriculum, and thinking creatively about what this might look like at Matua Ngaru School. We also celebrated Kate's birthday with her at the beginning of the week, surprising her with cake and balloons!
Communicative....
On Wednesday morning, we were joined once again by Te Rongopai and Dawn, who helped us to unpack the meaning of our school waiata (song). They also helped us work on our pronunciation of the vowel sounds in Te Reo so that we are able to say the words of our song correctly. Each member of our team shared a short mihi and whakapapa (family history) and talked about a landmark that was important to us. We also spent time discussing our four kāinga animals and their significance to the local iwi.
Heike ran a session with us on the Wednesday afternoon where we spent some time further unpacking our Herrmann Brain profiles and looking at ways of drawing upon different strengths and preferences to carry out a problem solving task.On Thursday, our Public Health Nurse, Bridget, came to meet us all and shared a bit about the different services they can provide for the learners and their families. The team are based at Waitakere Hospital and support families throughout the district, as well as over seeing things such as Hearing and Vision checks, and immunisations for Years 7 and 8.
Creative....
Michael led the team through a session exploring creativity and how each of us defined creativity, so that we could move towards a common understanding of what being creative means at Matua Ngaru.
We had an opportunity to get creative and spend some time playing and exploring on Thursday, when Heike took us through a session on Play Based Learning. We were building bridges, making mixtures and creating collages, whilst also thinking about the different skills and learning dispositions we were using to complete each of the tasks. It was heaps of fun, and we were all reluctant to stop and move on to the next activity - just goes to show that everyone enjoys a chance to play, no matter how old they may be.
Collaborative...
Monday morning saw the team revisiting our golden circles, which outline the why. how and what that underpin each of our 4Cs. We took the time to review and refine these so that we can be confident that our practices and beliefs align with our vision, and ensure that everyone has a shared understanding with regards to these. Later in the week, we followed on from this with a session focusing on our emerging curriculum and the types of learning experiences we could put in place to support our learners. As part of this we considered Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and the importance of designing learning experiences that will help meet the emotional and physiological needs of our learners as well as academic learning.
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| By FireflySixtySeven [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons |
this a vibrant, future focused space for everyone to enjoy.
Curious...
On Tuesday, the team divided into smaller teams and set off to explore different professional learning opportunities. Michael, Yasmin, Heike and Anoushka spent the morning visiting the team at Stonefields School and finding out about their journey as a new school, the development of their curriculum and the practices they have put in place to support learners and educators at their school.
Kirstin, Kate, Kelly and Amy spent the day with the team at Microsoft, exploring the educational potential of Minecraft, Michael joined them after the visit to Stonefields. They discovered that Minecraft provides opportunities for learners and educators to engage in all of our 4Cs as they work within the MInecraft platform. A highlight was being able to construct a building in Minecraft and then export it to a 3D virtual reality viewer, where the buidling could be placed into a real life setting. We could see a lot of potential for design based projects for our learners.
The whole team were able to visit Hobsonville Point Secondary School on Thursday morning and were shown around the school by the principal, Maurie Abraham. The school has adopted an innovative approach to curriculum delivery and we were interested to hear about the difference it was making to the learners at this school. On display around the spaces were some of the projects completed by senior students at the school, and we were blown away by the detail and sophistication of these projects.
We were also curious to see how our new school buildings were progressing, so on Thursday afternoon, Heike, Amy, Yasmin and Kelly were able to go on a site visit to see how everything was shaping up. We were really excited to see just how close to finished our kura (school) is looking!
Kirstin, Kate, Kelly and Amy spent the day with the team at Microsoft, exploring the educational potential of Minecraft, Michael joined them after the visit to Stonefields. They discovered that Minecraft provides opportunities for learners and educators to engage in all of our 4Cs as they work within the MInecraft platform. A highlight was being able to construct a building in Minecraft and then export it to a 3D virtual reality viewer, where the buidling could be placed into a real life setting. We could see a lot of potential for design based projects for our learners.
The whole team were able to visit Hobsonville Point Secondary School on Thursday morning and were shown around the school by the principal, Maurie Abraham. The school has adopted an innovative approach to curriculum delivery and we were interested to hear about the difference it was making to the learners at this school. On display around the spaces were some of the projects completed by senior students at the school, and we were blown away by the detail and sophistication of these projects.
We were also curious to see how our new school buildings were progressing, so on Thursday afternoon, Heike, Amy, Yasmin and Kelly were able to go on a site visit to see how everything was shaping up. We were really excited to see just how close to finished our kura (school) is looking!
Coming Up:
- Wendy's West Auckland Library Tour
- Team visit to The Gardens School
- Whanau Focus Group - Curriculum on Wednesday 7 November at 3:15pm
- Curiosity Quencher session - Thursday 8 November at 3:15pm
- Spotless training session
- More work on our curriculum design
- Another site visit for some of the team
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