Imagine standing at the door of your classroom and having a view of the beach, ocean, and distant islands! This is the view many of the teachers at Maraetai Beach School have every day. Maraetai Beach School is a decile 10 school (highest socioeconomic indicator), and is set in beautiful grounds. It caters for year 0 (new entrants) to Year 8 (the Years 7 and 8 students were at camp today), and the principal is a former literacy advisor, so she was great to talk with. Her assistant principal was really keen on writing, so she added a lot of information to our collection too.
We began in a Year 0 class, and worked our way up to Year 6. The school works, as have all the schools we have thus far visited, via inquiry. The students therefore take ownership of their learning and literacy is woven into all they do. We watched more group work where each group did something different including computer work, board games (Upwords, Junior Scrabble), small whiteboard work, reading plays from school journals, and working with the teacher for example.
We watched one teacher teaching his class a song - they sang, played the xylophones, and the recorders all to the same music. It was very interesting. He also had a times table competition in groups - the kids really seemed to enjoy that.
After visiting the classes, I spoke to a beginning teacher. It was her release day (every beginning teacher in NZ gets one day per week release in order to visit other classrooms, other schools, plan, meet with tutor teachers, attend PDs, or go to beginning teacher meetings), and she was using it to plan. She went to Waikato University and spoke very highly of her training. We will be visiting Waikato on Monday.
Then we spent more time with Lesley and her assistant principal of the junior department, Tamara. They are keen to host some of our Kentucky students! That was wonderful news! Perhaps we can use Maraetai in future classes.
I don't know if it was for a music class but it reminded me of when I was in Japan, in elementary school we all had to pick an instrument and play songs through out the year. The teacher also recorded the performance in class. Then during lunch time they played some of those performances on our school's broadcasting show. (not anything fancy)
ReplyDeleteI love the idea of playing the recordings over the broadcasting system; that makes it all so much more "real". I'm not really sure if this was a "music" class or not; it seems to me that so much is integrated in NZ schools that it's really hard to say "this is a science class" or "this is a social studies class". (SOOO glad to see you're reading these blogs, Lisa! Well done!)
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