Connections to the Sea

This term we are looking at connections and our Inquiry is based on "Secrets of the Sea Crits". The Junior School have a motivational visit planned to the Island Bay Marine Education Centre on the 6th March and the Senior School are going on the 13th March. We have also timetabled time into these days to visit the Giant Squid at Te Papa. Most classes are preparing for this in advance and looking at questions students have about this overarching theme. No doubt all cameras within the school will have batteries charged in readiness to record the students learning and experiences.

Multiple Intelligences and deBonos 6 hats

Schoolwide we are focussing on the teaching and learning using the yellow and black hats only this term. Years 5-8 are also investigating multiple intelligences. One staff member came across a website where you can fill in a questionaire to determine your approximate strengths in the multiple intelligence framework. They undertook to share this with their team members. All students in Years 5-8 have participated in this online questionaire. Students have been able to print out their wheel of strengths and are currently investigating these to better understand their personal learning styles.

2009

Well, 2009 has started well this year. The whole staff attended the Spectrum Education Teachers Matter Conference in Rotorua the last week of January. This got more staff onboard and was a great sharing time. We all went to the same breakouts and lots of new and collaborative learning took place. All staff came back excited, motivated and energetic for the start of the school year. All staff have implemented some part of their learning from Teachers Matter Conference and look forward to continuing to broaden their thinking with new ideas.

Teacher Only Day 3/11/08

Our staff chose to meet again on this day and finish later in the year to ensure we had our Inquiry Model in place with plenty of time to ensure all staff were ready to start the new year. We looked back on what we had achieved on Friday and made a few little changes to represent the thinking that has taken place over the weekend. We then went through and made a set of students notes to go with the teacher notes. After a much needed drink at morning tea time we continued with the appendices that we needed to add. This included different thinking tools, stratgies, graphic organisers, skills to be taught, etc.

This day produced some differing opinions on how this document was to go together. After further discussions as well as disagreements, we compromised on a solution that all agreed on.

We also worked on a planning sheet for all teaching staff to use. This also produced discussion on what needed to be included. We drafted a model for all staff to use. We decided that all staff needed to have input as all will be using but we now have a starting point. .

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.