Term 4 - Week 3 Spotlight @ MatuaNgaru

Tena kotou katoa!

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.

By FireflySixtySeven [CC BY-SA 4.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

On Wednesday, Wendy took the team through a session on ideating what our Whare Hapori (library) could look like, and exploring our ideas about the different ways we can use this space to meet the needs of our learners and the wider community. We are really looking forward to making 
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!
       

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

Term 3 Week 6 Spotlight @MatuaNgaru

We were excited to receive our banner flags this week as this has allowed us to become more visible at Huapai District School and has communicated to people and families meeting with us how to find us straight away. Thank you to Kirstin for researching and organising the flags, they look great!

 Di and Wendy have met with 8 families this week as part of family enrolment interviews. We have enjoyed learning about our learners, their families and establishing positive relationships with our school community. What talented and diverse learners Matua Ngaru is going to have with a fabulous group of interested and involved whānau to support and enrich our programmes and approaches!

Di and Amanda met with Spotless, who are our Property Management Company, they found out some useful things about our school buildings and how things will run once we open in February 2019.

Kirstin, Diana and Wendy are practicing daily, opening and closing Karakia, our Matua Ngaru waiata and a creative, scripted kōrerorero (conversation) which is our next Te Reo assessment in two weeks time and will be conducted in front of the rest of the class!

Diana, Kirstin and Michael were curious to find out more about minecraft and how the minecraft programme could enhance our learning and teaching at MNS. Crispin Lockwood led them trough some of the applications and features of the minecraft programme. The team are excited to find out more about the potential of this creative programme.

Michael and Kirstin have been ideating around options and ideas for using digital badging to induct our Learning Coaches in Term 4. We are all eager to see, hear and participate in their creative ideas around this project and achieve our badges in Term 4!

Wendy  had a wonderful time this week connecting with local kindy's and Early Childhood Centres in our community. At our Community Consultation night, 12 different ECE providers were identified as centres our newist Matua Ngaru learners will come from, so it is very important that we collaborate with ECE's and share knowledge and information so our tamariki get the best possible start at MNS. Wendy has been approached to be available for a Q & A session at Kereru Kindy, Huapai for prospective families. Emily the Head Teacher and Wendy have the planning for this underway.

Kirstin, Diana, Amanda and Wendy had the privilege this week of connecting with our colleagues and education partners at Arohanui Special School. We were made to feel very welcome and were lucky enough to visit two offsite Arohanui classrooms. One was at Te Atatu Intermediate and the other at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. It was fascinating learning to see a little of what these dedicated, passionate professionals do for a morning. We look forward to our continued close association and the opening of an Arohanui Classroom Unit and Outreach Centre at Matua Ngaru.

Diana, Kirstin and Wendy have been collaborating on our curriculum design and assessment approaches. We are enjoying the robust discussions and the opportunities to dive into research to back up our beliefs. This week we have focused on finding and making links between the New Zealand Curriculum and Te Whāriki - the Early Childhood Curriculum, both world class documents.

Wendy had an opportunity to further collaborate with Maggie Reid from Flanshaw Primary around how they use learning maps. Learning maps at Flanshaw are an integral part of what they do to report to family and whānau and maintain learner and whānau engagement, something Wendy and Di are exploring to become part of the Matua Ngaru approach.

Diana, Kirstin and Wendy all sat their first written Te Reo exam, as part of their ongoing AUT course on Conversational Maori, on Wednesday and are very curious to find out their results.

Kirstin and Diana attended a new product launch for Microsoft called Surface Go, they were curious about how the Surface Go could be used educationally.



Michael and Kirstin were able to visit the Flexible Learning Space at Huapai District School. They enjoy the visit in particular seeing how others have approached teaching and learning in a Flexible Learning Space.
Kirstin has met with a possible swimming programme provider, we are all curious to see the possible programme they could provide for our learners in the warmer months.

Our Senior Leadership Team PLG this week focused on John Hattie's latest article,WHAT WORKS BEST IN EDUCATION:THE POLITICS OF COLLABORATIVE EXPERTISE 2015. The article explored the idea of shifting to a collaborative expertise environment and had useful strategies to achieve this, as collaborative expertise is the best way to overcome within school variability and ensure our learners gain at least a year of learning for a years' input.

Term 1- it's all Over Grover!

What's the haps highlights:
Spotless and I have made huge progress with our FF&E.  The furniture types and quantities have been decided and James and I had a colour meeting with Spotless and ACG Architects to decide on the colour schemes for our learning zones as well.

Learning highlights:
It was wonderful to visit Riverhead, Huapai District School, Taupaki and Waimauku schools.  These schools all share a 'school zone' border with Matua Ngaru and it is important for me to begin forging a relationship of collabroation with each.  Kris, John, Pete and Gary were very welcoming and open in our discussions and I am confident we have begun with a positive connection.  In addition to meeting with the local school principals and touring their kura, I also had the opportunity to visit two Microsoft schools to see how they use the MS365 apps.  Hill Park is in the beginning stages of their use and Opaheke is a Microsoft Model School, well entrenched in their use of the platform.  I can see a lot of potential for us to use these in our multi-platform school, particularly with the older learners and our staff and the absolute potential for Minecraft EDU is powerful.  I can't wait to learn more and design ways for integration into our curriculum design and systems set up.

I also spent some time with James, principal at Arohanui Special School and an EBoT trustee, discussing how he envisions a learning support model could operate out of the Arohanui Hub on our shared campus.  His plans are exciting as they would enable staff to support more learners with high learning needs more effectively but the model is awaiting approval.  His work with Tracy Martin has been very fruitful and we will wait with anticipation to see if we can enact it at Matua Ngaru.

I can't believe that the term is coming to an end!  I look back and see how much I have learned, and yet I look forward to see how much more there is to do.  While overwhelmed at times I remain absolutely committed to and excited about setting up Matua Ngaru for our wonderful tamariki.

What's next?

• Google Summit (our whole team to attend in the break #DreamTeam!) 
• NZEALs (in the break with Mel and Bev) 
• NZAI PL (Kirstin to attend in my stead) 
• Kirstin starts in week 1 
• Wendy Starts in Week 3 
• Auckland School Visit Extravaganza with Te Uho O Te Nikau in Week 7 & 8
• Rototuna Principal PLG 
• WAPA Reflective Practice PL
• The Learning Brain PL
• Next Practice PL (@OJC)
• IT procurement
• ERO visit #3
• and so much more ....