Prep Week 2 Term 1 2019 @MatuaNgaru Spotlight

Tena kotou katoa

Just before dawn on Wednesday morning, we gathered together at the entrance to our beautiful new kura (school). The silence was broken by the call (karanga) of the kaikaranga (caller) and the steady rhythm of the karakia (prayers) from the kaumatua (elder), two of our mana whenua. This was the beginning of our blessing ceremony, the first part of our official opening of Matua Ngaru School. As the sun began to rise, we moved through every part of the school, laying our hands on the walls, doors and furniture, ensuring that our school will be a place where our whole school community are safe, happy and well as they take each step on their learning journey. It was a very special and moving experience to be part of.

Communicative....

Once we completed the pathway through the school, we gathered together in our Whare Tapere (hall), where members of our iwi, eBOT, James - the principal of Arohanui, and Diana spoke to all assembled, and we shared several waiata (songs) in support of the speakers. This was followed by the Matua Ngaru and Arohanui educators, eBOT and mana whenua participating in hongi (the pressing together of noses and sharing of breath, which signifies the 2 groups becoming unified). Once this was complete, we were no longer considered manuhiri (visitors) and became tangata whenua of Matua Ngaru School. To conclude the formalities, everyone participated in the sharing of kai (food), which lifts the tapu (sacredness) from all those involved.

Curious 

Shortly after the first event on Wednesday morning, we gathered together again in Whare Tapere to welcome all of our learners and their parents as they came to meet their learning coaches and explore their kāinga before we open for learning on 7 February. We were so excited to see how many of our learners were curious about their new school as they entered the hall and participated in hongi with the educators us. The line went all the way out of Whare Tapere, along the hallway and all the way outside! Once everyone was seated, we again listened to speakers, sang waiata and shared kai so that our learners and their families also became part of the tangata whenua of our school.

After that, learners were matched with their learning coaches and everyone headed off to their kāinga to explore, get to know each other, engage with provocations and become familiar with their new learning space. At 12:00, the last of our learners headed home, and our educators spent the afternoon preparing for the next group of learners who were coming to the open morning the next day.







On Friday, Wendy, Yasmin, Heike and Anoushka were all curious to find out how they can promote well being at Matua Ngaru as they spent the day with other educators learning about Hauora (well being).

Creative....

Our educators had a busy day on Tuesday setting up their kāinga  and getting every thing ready for our 2 open mornings. They were showing amazing creative flair with some of their displays and with their designing of activities for all of our learners.






Collaborative...

Setting up Whare Hapori (our library) was the focus on Monday, with some of the team, along with their families, working together to set up displays, prepare and shelve books and work out the best configuration for the shelves and furniture.


While the rest of the team were away learning about well being on Friday, Di, Michael, Kirstin, Kate and Kelly worked together to synthesise and clarify our ideas around our Effective Educator Matrix, Learning Model and Educator Code of Conduct.

It's hard to believe that next week we will be welcoming our learners for their first day of school! We are all very excited and can't wait to meet you all.

Term 4 - Week 2 Spotlight @MatuaNgaru

Tena koutou katoa!

Week 2, a four day week after we all got treated to a sunny and relaxing long weekend with last Monday being Labour Day. Great that we had that time to catch our breath as well as letting the amazement and magic sink in of the terrific journey that lies ahead of us. We returned on Tuesday with anticipation to continue our #ubiquitouslearning on a wave of change.

Communicative....

More time was dedicated towards unpacking our school vision and values by deliberating about the implication and significance of these. What do these mean to us and what principles and practices will we incorporate in our learning space? The level of engagement, the thoughtful questions and the quality of the responses were an encouraging sign that all of us are owning the stake we have in this. Time is always sparse, still we must ensure that we get this right.

Wednesday we engaged with our Mana Whenua. We greeted Te Rongopai, Dawn and Te Kahui-iti Morehu by singing our school waiata “Ko Matua Ngaru Te Tira Waka” and they responded by singing the waiata “Te Aroha”. Te Kahui-iti Morehu shared her knowledge and gifted us insight into her historic recollection. We learnt about the whakapapa of the school location and the wider area by listening to interesting anecdotes told in a charismatic style. What an absolute privilege it is for us to work with these wonderful wāhine - members of the Ngati Whatua iwi.

We are looking forward to connecting with our Whanau Focus Group on Wednesday afternoon and consult with them as we cultivate their ideas of how they envision Mataua Ngaru School connecting with the community. Wendy and Di have continued to engage with and meet our wonderful learners as part of our enrolment procedures.  Our whanau interviews have been a wonderful face to face way to begin a strong home-school partnership and we now have 50 learners officially pre-enrolled!

Creative....

The team has kept the momentum of engaging into the innovative Digital Induction Badging programme which has been so brilliantly designed by Kirstin and Michael. What a great podium for our Learning Coaches to exhibit and share their professional learning as well as to cooperate and collaborate. Gauging the wide variety of talent as well as the eagerness the team brings along to engage in self directed learning, reflecting and connecting the learning from week 1, the learning coaches collaboratively created mind maps that really display the vast amount of information and learning and perhaps more importantly, how all the concepts are interlinked with each other.  

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Again, the team engaged in Tinker Time exploring and playing with a variety of e tools creating outcomes that will surely find their use in our learning space.Wendy organised this week’s team building challenge #dreamteam by tasking us to create an original advertisement for two or our upcoming community events. However, the project scope expanded and we will complete this task next week.

Mark Osbourne joined us for a “Ponder” conversation discussing and playing around with ideas what our Makerspace could look like, what resources we want to engage with and what learning will happen in it. Kirstin and Wendy were busy taking notes for the resource wish list. Obviously, this will all depend on the learners we are going to have in our school, though it was brilliant to have this expert input and someone to challenge our thinking!

Collaborative...

Further co-constructing and conceptualising our behaviour management approach was a major focus throughout this week. Jenny Barker from MoE helped us to dig deeper into understanding restorative practice and the PB4L framework. Through voting we decided that we are going to be a PB4L School. Sue Smith and Andrew Cowie shared with us the Upper Harbour School way of implementing restorative practice, cultural responsiveness and digital citizenship. Some valuable thinking prompts sparked productive conversation within the team such as being aware of making assumptions, digging deeper and understanding culture beyond ethnicity as well as going beyond greetings and food when making cultural connections.

Luke Sumich presented the Hermann's Whole Brain Model and revealed our profiles. While there may be pros and cons about this framework, the leadership team thinks it will be practical to recognise the unique way each of us processes information and then, use this information to accommodate the way we communicate accordingly. Amazingly, our team has a reasonable spread across all four quadrants, but there is a tendency towards yellow, the experimental and innovative quadrant. Innovative ideas are beneficial when involved in founding a new school and shifting the paradigm, however, we need to make sure we hold ourselves accountable on this ubiquitous learning journey. For that reason, the blue, green and red quadrants are equally important. In particular, fruitful will be implementing the common language that this thinking tool offers which we will engage in throughout the coming weeks.

Michael also engaged us in a presentation about designing rituals and routines to foster a culture of innovation.  We are looking forward to our next steps with this.Diana, Kirstin and Wendy worked with the Establishment Board of Trustees to begin the process of ideating towards our 2019 Strategic Plan. They began by unpacking the NZSTA Strategic Planning document and the brainstormed ideas for goals around what we want for our learners, interrogating these along the way.  The Strategic Leadership Team will continue to evolve these ideas into a draft plan to be shared with our stakeholders for feedback. Diana also attended a workshop run by the Ministry of Education, facilitated by Rebecca Cook, on school finance.  Dianne Cook from our board attended with her.In addition, gauging the talent and strengths our learning coaches bring along, Michael engaged us in a strengthsfinder session. This information will support us in delegating & co-constructing responsibilities and forming project teams as well as getting all involved in the planning of #ubiquitouslearning.

Curious

An important part of our induction programme will be visiting schools and see innovative practice implemented. On Tuesday the team visited Hobsonville Point Primary School. Before inquisitively wandering throughout the school, Daniel Birch, the foundation principal, shared his experience and reflections about 5 years of Hobsonville Point Primary School. While it is difficult to pinpoint the most valuable piece of information, being prepared to unlearn and relearn as well as ruthlessly engaging in critical reflection is definitely ranking very high. Whenever we engaged with the HPPS children, we were impressed with their ability to articulate their learning and the process they were involved in. Kate, who was the lucky recipient of our free conference registration, shared her key takeaways and insights from this year’s ULearn conference 2018.

 

To finish, we wonder if you are all curious to learn more about our school?  We have a fantastic Community Consultation Evening planned for November 22 at 7pm in the hall at Huapai District School.  We will share our progress, seek feedback and have many of our partners present such as SKIDs, Jellybeans Music, Argyles, Office Max, Dorothy Butler and more.  We hope that you will join us!

Coming up:

• Whanau focus group - Community Connections on Wednensday

• Minecraft Training

• Visit to Stonefields

• Resource Procurement

• Our Emerging Curriculum

• A visit to Hobsonville Point Secondary School

• Designing our digital korowai

• Strategic Planning for 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.

Linc-Ed linking us together

Induction by fire for Wendy!
We had the lovely Glenys join us for a full on day of learning around how to set up our LMS Linc-Ed.  We have all come from schools who have used alternate systems and are excited about the affordances that Linc-Ed will provide our kura, having been developed by a principal.  The features that excite us, and which framed our rationale, include:

• intuitive and styly!
• usable by learners, parents and staff as a truly interactive, useful LMS
• unique to NZ and simple, secure
• enables our educators to add links, embed artifacts and provide feedback to learners
• empowers our tamariki to share their learning process and products digitally
• parent portal capable- creating a unique home-school partnership that enables whanau to engage in real time and have ubiquitous access to their children's learning and assessment and this all aligns with the #ubiquitouslearning component of our vision
• Have the ability for us to design a badging system should we wish to gamify aspects of our curriculum

Site customization Presentation here.