Inquiry in room 3 term 4

We are about to begin using our intersection for work on our focus of designing a healthy lunchbox under the title Crunch and Munch. Currently the children have been looking at food labels and the ingredients in those items of food and discussion around where sugar falls in that list and what are some of the other ingredients found on those lists.
I need to create some cars as we need to all start at the Explore car park and then the children will be able to move around as they become more involved with their inquiry.
I believe it is really important that the exploration is done as a whole class first because the discussion allows some of the children who have difficulty moving from the unistructural level to the multistrctural a chance to hear and think about ideas raised by others further down the thinking model.

Inquiry Development Update

Kia ora,

Just an update from me regarding the development of our Inquiry model and its subsequent implementation throughout our school. Pleasing recent developments include:
1) visual wall displays of Poroutawhao Inquiry Intersection model now in most classrooms. After discussions, these will be used with the children in a consistent way across the school,
2) presentation of Inquiry model guidelines which explain what each dimension of our model actually looks like in our class, ie what you may see when any of these areas becomes an Inquiry focus
3) progress has been made with revising the assessment matrix so that it more accurately represents the Inquiry work we are doing,
4) Further progress in the use of SOLO taxonomy as wa way that we can see what our lerarning looks like and what we can do to improve.

Reinforcement from our ICT cluster facilitator once again assures Fiona and myself that we are leading the school in the right direction. I am satisfied that everyone is also fully behind the direction we are taking. Our teachers are continuing to be challenged and in general, they are responding. Sometimes we just have to be patient and wait for them but they are in general, on board.

I once again acknowledge the lead teacher work that Fiona Mitchell is taking. She is very much a cutting edge teacher now and we are all learning from her.

Don't forget to blog often. It is a record of this professional development.

Kia ora

Neil Hirini
Principal

Inquiry Progress Update

We had a fantastic staff meeting yesterday where we made great progress with our matrix as our assessment tool for the inquiry process. Our model is now finalised and up and running in all classes. The children are responding to it really well. SOLO has also now been implemented into all classes, and teachers are finding that the children are catching on to the thinking easier than what we thought. We have used SOLO as the basis for a self assessment on our school value of participation, which was our focus from last term. The children in Room 2 first of all defined what participation was and then focused on their own participation in the school production. They self assessed this against the rubrics that we created as a staff for this purpose. As we get more confident ourselves we will involve the children more in the construction of the rubrics.
Above is our finalsed inquiry model, which is based on our learning theme of a journey along the highway (being situated on State Highway 1).
We have also created a handbook to work alongside our model so that as a staff we all know what each stage means.