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.