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

Term 3 - Week 3 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tena koutou katoa
We are now a third of the way through the term and feel settled into Room 6, at Huapai District School. John and the team at Huapai have made us all feel welcome and it is great being in the same community as our school, Matua Ngaru.

Communicative
Diana, Kirstin and Wendy have been meeting with After Hours School Care providers this week. Having a quality before and after school care programme was something our prospective families clearly communicated they wanted at our Community Consultation night. We have chosen to meet with 3 providers who provide the same services at other local schools. We will make a decision in the next week or two.

On Wednesday this week Diana, Kirstin and Wendy all took part in their first Te Reo oral assessment at AUT (Mahi-Korero 1). The good news is, of course, we all passed with flying colours! Our weekly attendance at the Te Reo course is part of our commitment to interweaving Te Reo and Tikanga through everything we do at Matua Ngaru in acknowledgement and celebration of New Zealand's bi-cultural partnership and heritage.

Wednesday afternoon saw Diana and Wendy meeting with Mandy from Argyle , our uniform providers, to finalise uniform design and colour. Mandy will return to us in the next few weeks with a final colour and design.

Some of you will be aware that Amanda, our office administrator extraordinaire, has been contacting families who have filled in the pre-enrolment form to arrange a family enrolment meeting time and to inform them of the next steps in the process for formal enrolment. We have been working hard on developing  the family interview questionnaire and creating a transition to school programme. We want to learn as much as we can about our tamariki, their passions, interests, needs and strengths before we teach them. It is all about building relationships and knowing our learners, the family interviews are an important  first step!

Collaborative
On Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons Kirstin returned to Oteha Valley School to participate in two staff meetings to update her First Aid Certificate. Wendy updated hers at the beginning of Term 2. Amanda also recently completed her full first aid certificate, we are feeling well covered and supported should a medical event occur!

As a result of our collaborative meetings with our community around our school uniform a preferred colour poll was put on Facebook and the results are in! Steel Blue was the clear winner and as mentioned previously we have met with Mandy from Argyle and are ready to move into the next stage of developing the Matua Ngaru School uniform.

Curious
On a wet and wild Wednesday evening Heike and Wendy attended a REANZ (Reggio Emilia Aotearoa New Zealand) Conversation evening. They were both very curious to find out more about the Reggio Emilia philosophy. The evening was about considering the agentic force of things and the material environment on learning . We discussed the term Intra active, which refers to the generative and interdependent relationship between living organisms and the material environment such as everyday objects, spaces and places. The discussion was underpinned by the book written by Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, called Going beyond theory/practice divide in early childhood. Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. The big take away of the evening was it's promotion of having a flexible and open mindset, while being in the moment and thinking ahead to what might emerge, whilst in the moment. Letting the child lead rather than the educator. Heike and Wendy attend a follow evening early in September which will focus on how things and the material environment may be affecting the learner's actions and meaning making

Our last scheduled meeting for the week was to meet with Michael and Heike to update them on what has been happening, to continue to ideate around curriculum and daily design and connect with them about how their term is going in their respective educator roles.

Creative
Kirstin has been working hard to transpose our school song from audio to written notation so we can create an instrumental track to accompany our singing. Diana, Amanda and Wendy have been doing their best to learn the words and practise the melody. This song has been gifted to us from a member of our eBoT and the local iwi, Te Rongopai Morehu.

Site Visit & Community Consultation Evening

We have had to very significant and special events this week.  First, we had our first official site visit where the #DreamTeam plus James did a tour of the building in it's current state.  It was so valuable to be able to get a sense of the floor plan and the size of the spaces.  

We then went to Huapai District School to set up for our second Community Consultation evening.  A lot of preparation went into this evening, including a mail drop in the school zone conducted by Kirstin, Wendy and I (plus our whanau), advertising in the local papers and newsletters (thanks Sam!) and preparation of the resources and presentation on the night.See our slides from the evening below:

See the thank you email I sent to our EBoT and team below:

Yesterday was epic.  The Matua Ngaru team of educators had an amazing site visit with Andrew.  It was very exciting to see how the build is shaping up and for us to begin to visualise what our kura will look like when finished.  It was the fuel to fire me up!  See the photos here.

Then what followed was an outstanding team approach to our Community Consultation evening.  Micheal King reckons that we had around 100 guests- a great turn out for sure.  This wouldn't have been possible without John and Sam from Huapai for being the most accommodating hosts (soon to be roommates)- thanks to you both for the venue, the IT kit and Sam for organising the creche/early advertising as well.    

I  can't thank you all enough for your contributions to a very successful and insightful evening with our many prospective Matua Ngaru parents (and potential future Learning Coaches).  I can easily align our 4 Vision Principles to the night:

• Curious-Mahirahira:  the community was full of curiosity and had the opportunity to learn from our presentation.  They really enjoyed the opportunity to question us at the 6 stations

• Collaborative-Mahi tahi: the collective effort of the EBoT and SLT (including Amanda) was organic and I must say we make a great team!  Thanks to Wendy and Kirstin for getting our supplies, Michael for getting me on the wifi and Alan for coordinating catering and Micheal for blessing the food.   

• Creative-Auaha: our SLT pumped their creative juices into the evening through the displays, activities and the fab media Kirstin prepared.

• Communicative-Whakaro: this was our goal for the evening and... tick!  We were able to convey clarity around our vision and big picture ideas/approach and the essence of Matua Ngaru.  We are committed to using our 4Cs, adaptive expertise, the NZC and Te Reo/Tikanga Maori.  We will be adding the slides (with the community feedback) to our social media next week.

Finally, an extra special thank you to Michael, Heike and Amanda for taking the time to contribute to our evening- this is very much appreciated.

Heike, Wendy, Kirstin and I visited the Forest School today (and Heike's collaborative magic at Windy Ridge) and we were able to discuss the evening.  We are feeling really positive and invigorated.  

Thanks again everyone- he waka eke noa!