Term 3 Week 8 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tena kotou katoa!

It has been yet another busy week for the Matua Ngaru team with lots of discussion, planning, exploring and new learning taking place. It's hard to believe that we are only a few weeks away from the end of Term 3, our opening date of 7 February 2019 is getting closer and closer and our school buildings are beginning to look more like the concept drawings we shared with you all at our community consultation meetings.


Communicative....


This week, we have continued to meet with families for pre-enrolment interviews, and it has been fabulous getting to know each of our future learners, their parents and even some of their grandparents. If you have been watching the counter on the first page of our school website, you will have noticed that the number of pre-enrolled foundation learners is beginning to grow.

Tuesday afternoon and early evening saw Diana at the Auckland Primary Principals' Association Beginning Teacher expo. Diana spent the afternoon meeting with soon to graduate teacher trainees and sharing with them what makes Matua Ngaru School special.

As you all know, this last week was Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week) and the team have been practising our school waiata (song) every day, as well as beginning and ending our meetings each day with non-religious karakia (blessings). Wendy, Kirstin and Diana have also been busy practising our dialogue for our AUT assessment next week, where we have to hold a conversation about how we are feeling, where we are from, share a little bit about our parents, our children and/or pets and ask and answer a couple of questions about everyday classroom objects.  This has been a really big learning curve for the 3 of us and we have definitely spent time in the learning pit as we make mistakes and try and try again. 


Earlier in the week we shared the following video on our Facebook page, and it is definitely a message worth sharing again. This video made something very clear to us as a school that will nurture and grow Kiwi kids representing an array of cultures. Janelle Riki-Waaka from Core Education shares her clear, powerful and absolute 'why' for honouring Te Reo and Tikanga Maori in our schools in Aotearoa.   This is powerful. This is our responsibility. 

Giving mana to Tiriti o Waitangi in our schools from EDtalks on Vimeo.

If you would like to start exploring a bit of Te Reo (language) and Tikanga (way of doing things) with your family, then this beautiful website called Pepeha has just been released. On this site you are guided through building and creating your own pepeha (personal introduction) and it helps you with learning some basic phrases and pronunciation along the way. You can even download a copy of your pepeha once you have finished.

Creative.... 

We were very excited on Monday afternoon, when Mandy from Argyle (our uniform provider) arrived with our colour dipped fabric sample for final approval. The shade of blue we will be using for our uniform is a new colour, and at this stage there are no other schools in New Zealand with this particular shade. Because of this, the company has named the new colour Matua Blue, which we think is pretty awesome! We also got to look at some of the initial prototypes for our polo and fleece - they are looking very smart.

Wendy and Heike attended their second evening session exploring Reggio Emilia on Wednesday where they had the opportunity to think creatively about how children are connected to their environment as they play and explore the world around them.

Collaborative...


Diana, Wendy and Kirstin started timetabling the various tasks and events that will take place next term, this will help us with planning and organising the term ahead.

On Thursday, Diana met with the company who are working on the signage for our school buildings.

Wendy and Kirstin have continued to meet with various resource providers, and on Friday, Wendy had an opportunity to meet  with representatives from Auckland Transport to discuss what is involved in our becoming a Travelwise school.

Curious...

On Monday morning, Diana, Kirstin, Wendy and Michael visited Morgan McKeen and her class at Parnell District School. Morgan is using Microsoft tools and software with her Year 5/6 class in innovative ways, and we were keen to learn more about what she is doing and see the tools and pedagogy in action.

We are sure you are all curious to find out who our Learning Coaches (teachers) will be. We are delighted to welcome Amy Robertshaw, Anoushka Carnie, Kate Davison, Kelly Gaston and Yasmin Mohamed to the Matua Ngaru Team. 

What's Coming Up?

• More family interviews
• New schools' PLG meet up
• Kirstin and Wendy attending Maker Space PD
• Learning Coach meet up

Term 3, Week 4 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tena kotou katoa!

Week four has come and gone and it was certainly a fantastic week of learning and designing.  Here are some of our highlights.

Monday and Tuesday this week saw Kirstin meeting with the Deputy Principals of both Kaipara College and Massey High School to familiarise herself with both schools and what they have to offer; to explore opportunities for reciprocal partnerships and to  discuss the process involved in transitioning our future Year 8 learners on to secondary school.

On Tuesday morning, Diana and Amanda attended training with Leading Edge, a company who provides financial services including support and professional development - this week the focus was on Xero.

During the week, the team also met with more before & after school care providers and we will be making a decision soon as to which provider we will be using at Matua Ngaru School. We also spent some time finalising the Staff Handbook (soon to have a fantastic and creative name!?) which we have been working on. This A-Z of Matua Ngaru document will support our learning coaches as part of their induction programme in Term 4.  It will also be an ongoing reference source in the future and will change and evolve over time as required.

A big focus for Wendy this week has been the development of our school 'library' (what will we call this magical space?) including: systems we will use, resources, learning opportunities the library will provide, etc.  On Monday she met with Esther Casey, the librarian at Sylvia Park School to look at the innovative ways in which their school library was meeting the needs of learners. Esther was deliberate at providing us with provocations around the nature of 'libraries' and challenged us to not call it 'Whare Pukapuka' as a future focused 'library' should be so much more than a book repository!  Then, on Friday, she met with Sandi from the National Library of New Zealand. Sandi was able to share lots of ideas and suggestions for developing our library, as well as making us aware of professional development opportunities and networks available to us.

Wendy was also lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend the matinee performance of Huapai District School's production of Aladdin. She was absolutely blown away by the talented performances of the young cast.

We have also be beavering away at creating some "fact sheets" around some of the terminology that is often associated with MLEs, ILEs, FLSs... whatever you want to call them.  Our topics include:  Collaborative Practice, Innovative Practice, Collaborative Learning, Play Based Learning and Inclusive Learning.  We look forward to sharing these in the near future.

This week our team read Core Education's 2018 10 Trends document selected by Kirstin and "Making Connections" (Dahlberg, 2004) a reading Wendy and Heike were given after their REANZ evening for our mostly weekly PLG (Professional Learning Group). Both readings gave us a lot to discuss and think about as we continue to explore and design the Matua Ngaru curriculum particularly around what is influencing future focused education in the 5 categories:   Technology- the cloud and blockchain, Structural- Kahui Ako and Virtual Learning, Process- collaboration and data science, Economic- automation and STEM and Cultural- AI and learner agency.  We are challenged in our thinking around designing a relational space that prioritises the making of connections through the senses and process of making/creating.  How do we avoid the constraints of the dreaded timetable?!
On Wednesday, Diana drove through the wind and rain to Taupo to attend the APPA Conference.  It was a wonderful opportunity to connect with other educational leaders and to be inspired.  A time to fill the learning tank!  Martin Sneddon, who's a bit of a Kiwi legend, enthralled us with his tale of leading the design of the 2011 Rugby World Cup here in New Zealand.  The ingredients for success include: a compelling story, developing strong relationships (he'll take EQ or IQ anyday!) and coherent decision making. 

Debbie Mayo-Smith provided us with a plethora of tips for learning to exploit technology to save us valuable time (presentation here). 

Roger Moses shared his learning from leading with us and reminded us to focus on the urgent,  get the right people on the bus and THEN decide where to go, that there is no harm in hoping for the best as long as you are prepared for the worst, be a servant leader, be available, open the door of opportunity and equip your team to be able to walk through them, don't accept every new idea as truth, practice the power of praise and identify your young guns and give them the ammunition they need to succeed.  What a man! 

The highlight of the conference for me was the few hours we were able to spend with Joan Baker who challenged us to focus on what she calls 'killer questions'.  Some examples include: How do we enable (not disable) change in our schools?  How are we making things better for our people/organisation?  How can I expand my impact?  How does our work have meaning for us? What values did I use to make decisions today?  What's currently harder than it should be? What must we preserve? Give up?  Are we proving or improving?  What am I learning?unlearning? and my personal favourite "why would anyone want to be led by me/us?" If people are afraid of blame not failure, what can I do to make our place safe to take risks?  There is certainly a lot to think on and put into place.

Amanda spent Thursday at a conference for Office Administrators. She was able to attend a variety of different workshops relating to different aspects of the administrator role and hone in on the different skills and understandings needed in each area. She said it was a fantastic day and has come back full of ideas and new learning that she can't wait to put into practice.

As Matua Ngaru will not have a swimming pool, Kirstin has been making contact with different swimming lesson providers in order to explore options for our aquatics programme. We will be able to provide more details later on once we have looked at what is on offer and determined which will best meet the needs of our learners and community.

Looking Ahead to What is Coming Up:

• Michael Davidson is joining us on Mondays for the rest of the term
• Meetings with reps from different educational resource providers
• Te Reo Session 6
• eBoT Meeting
• Decision around after school care providers
• Continuing work on curriculum development