Rotorua and Waikowhai Intermediates

On Friday, after visiting Royal Oak Primary, we drove to Rotorua where we spent the weekend. We stayed in a large, beautiful home on the shores of Lake Rotorua, and it was very peaceful. We didn't all do the same things, so I'll let you know what I did. On the Saturday we drove around the town looking at some of the boiling mud and water pools. The earth's crust is very thin in Rotorua, so there's a lot of geothermal activity. After lunch we drove south to a river (off the main road) which was hot! I enjoyed sitting under the waterfall and digging my toes into the pumicey bottom. The stones were hot and the lovely hot water was like a massage. After the swim, we drove home and changed for the Maori hangi which also included a tour of a constructed village and a concert. I loved it. We were driven back to our car on a bus, and the bus driver was pretty cool. He sang songs and drove around a roundabout several times as we all sang "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes". The next day I went luging with my family and Jody. It was so much fun! There are three different tracks and you speed down them on a sort of go-cart thing. When you get to the bottom you catch a ski lift back up to the start. Oh, to get to the luge, you go up on gondalas which give an amazing view of Rotorua and the lake. After the luge we returned home for an hour or two before heading off to the Polynesian Spa. I stayed with my sister and her family which meant we could only go in three pools (one was a fresh water warm pool, and two were sulphur pools). The pool had a policy that children under 8 had to be accompanied by their parents IN THE SAME POOL! So that sort of spoiled the trip. We wanted to sit in the hot pools while the kids (who are great swimmers, btw) used the big (and much cooler) pool. We were only 2.5 meters away, but that wasn't good enough. Personally, I thought that was a stupid rule; I think that the basis for accompanying a child should be ability to swim, not age. But, noone asked me. After the pools, we got some fish and chips and went back to the house to eat them. After a dose of House I went to bed. Next morning we went to Rotorua Intermediate where we were greeting with a Powhiri. It was amazing! I filmed the haka which the kids performed, and we sang our song. Then we were taken around the school, visiting lots of classes before the end of the day. It wish I could say a bit more, but my brain is really tired. In fact, all of me is really tired. I took lots of photos though, so when I go back through them I'll be able to say more. Today we went to Waikowhai Intermediate. This was the school where I did my first two years of teaching, so it was really nice to go back there. They showed us lots of different literacy lessons, including work with grammar and word study, word detectives, guided reading, SRA, and Rainbow reading. Again we saw a lot of group work, and while it is true that there was off task behavior, I think it was tough for the kids having all four of us in the room. My gut tells me that the off task behavior was tolerated more simply because the teacher wanted to show us how s/he conducted reading and didn't want to waste time. I could be wrong, but I did note that most of the kids had evidence of quite a bit of work in their exercise books, indicating they are definitely on task quite a lot! We drove home after school, and I immediately started booking all the travel and accommodation for the next few days. We are heading to Christchurch tomorrow (and will have limited internet access for the next 6 days or so), so that should be interesting.