Teacher Only Day 31/10/08

Today our staff met to look at the new curriculum document on the day the Ministry set aside. We chose not to meet up with other Levin schools and to spend the time as a staff to organise and write our own inquiry learning document. We split into two teams with one team looking at Literacy, Numeracy, PE & Health, and The Arts with the other team looking at Inquiry. We were both on the Inquiry Team. We started by looking at a Inquiry Learning Policy for our school. We looked at Coley Street's model as well as other schools and developed our own rationale, purpose and guidelines. We then used this to develop our model. We had a range of models which we took information off and developed our own to introduce next year. We also had Michael Pohls books on hand. One of the staff came up with "Stars" as icons and the galaxy. We liked the 5 cornered star so fit our Inquiry Model into 5 steps to fit Ohau School. We then added the tails to link them together. We also wrote up a set of definitions for each stage and a set of teachers notes to go with these. It was a very profitable day with interesting discussions and points of interests.

Staff Meeting

We held a staff meeting today and were looking at possible overarching ideas for next year. We came up with a few different ones but decided that
"Its a small, small world" with a Social Studies major first, then science and lastly technology. We decided on having 3 Inquiries over the year bridging terms and two mini units with a focus on The Arts as well as Health/PE-PA at the start and the end of the year. This enables us to include the students in our planning as well as finish our inquiries before reporting to parents. It also means we have time at the start of each term to organise and take on board the Inquiry topics more fully.

U-Learn Conference - 7th - 10th October 2008

After our proposed shopping day before the conference was to start was cut short due to the weather and late departure from Wellington, we arrived in Christchurch to bright sunshine and warm weather. We made our way to our motel and registered at the Convention Centre in due course. The conference was opened on the Wednesday by Chris Carter with a view from the Government. Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach followed with some inspirational ideas. Bruce McIntyre responded on behalf of the business sector amid yawns and quiet chatter. He was not the most inspirational of speakers. Following the opening, we went to our first two breakouts. The first was on using ICT in the classroom from a school in Auckland. We got to converse with students from his class online but got the impression all was not as it seems. Our second breakout was listening to two young teachers from a Christchurch School talking about the Inquiry Process in their classrooms. This was interesting and provided guidelines ideas for us to take back to our school. The Keynote speaker on Thursday was Steven Carden. He spoke for over an hour with no notes and spoke from the heart. Very enjoyable and inspirational. Further breakouts that we went to followed the same lines. We will look at attending breakouts from keynote speakers when we go to Learning at Schools in February. This way we may achieve more value on our learnings. Overall the conference was enjoyable but not as inspirational as we wanted. We got back and produced a photostory of our journey which we shared with others at school as well as some ideas to shape to our school requirements.