The Year to Date

Kia ora Everyone,

Apologies for not checking in sooner but with one thing or another time has just seemed to slip by. First and foremost I have to congratulate my two staff members, Amanda and Fiona, who presented our Inquiry model, the Poroutawhao Inquiry Intersection, at the Learning at Schools Conference in Rotorua back in term 1. The feedback from this to date has been outstanding and this truly represented the fact that we have taken our school to the next level in terms of Inquiry development and implentation in our school. We are now confident enough in what we are doing to share with others. Ka pai tera!

Last term I was also thrilled to be able to analyse our second set of data, based on our Term 3, 2008, Inquiry unit. This data was based on assessments taken against our Inquiry matrix, showed that the vast majority of our students, 92% in fact, were Inquiring at or above an age appropriate level.

This year it was awesome to introduce the revised inquiry assessment matrix with features being the inclusion of SOLO taxonomy within the indicators and the creation of a bank of Level 5 indicators. To date, this has been well received.

Recently I once again took the time to rove through the classrooms and talk to students about Inquiry and was thrilled to hear comments such as, "you learn so much", its makes our work so interesting", and "I always know where I am". The feeddback that I got proved to me that our children are more engaged in learning through inquiry and are therefore far more motivated. They are also far more able to describe their learning, ie what they know now and what they need to know or do to enhance learning from there.

All in all, a very rosy picture in terms of Inquiry in our school.

Room 3 - Term 1 2009

We have been sharing with room 4 a guest speaker from the police and talking about traditional tales that explore the idea of telling lies, and making wrong choices. Using the "good character.com" and making the "right choices" a book from the police we have discusssed good and bad choices with reference to SOLO and HATS. We have not yet got to the intersection.

Room 4 - Term 1 2009

We have been introduced to our new learning intersection model. We have begun exploring our topic "Order in the Court" by reading stories, having a guest seaker from the police department, talking about Right and Wrong, and using information about making right choices from "good character.com". We have started using Multistructural thinking to list choices that wrong.

Room One Inquiry - Term One

Hello all. Great start back to 2009. The one thing that has gone really well with my class this year are my children. They are great, they have carried on with the already learnt knowledge of our inquiry intersection. Our inquiry intersection is becoming embedded within our children. Thank you Fiona for the children who have come through to my class with this knowledge. With our classroom inquiry 'Order in the Court' we are at the stage of finding information from various sources of information to answer our own questions, which were generated through our ask session. An activity which was exciting and interesting for my class was at the exploring stage, where we had the local police educational officer in, who took 2 sessions on law and rules. This session was very interactive and really had the children thinking and questioning the topic of law and order.

Room 5.

Its been hard getting back into the swing of inquiry after being on leave. My children have all been able to give a definition about rules. I am really happy with the results that I got from this. We have just started to introduce solo which is a slow process and I am hoping to get the kids to assess their own defintion. We have just gone on to ask. Our question is How can we fix a problem after breaking a rule? We will be doing some role-plays and I want the children to use the video camera to record these. I also have a range of people coming to talk to the kids i.e. neighbourhood support co-ordinator, fire safety educator and a police person. The kids are really looking forward to the ride in the police car.

Learning at Schools 09

Yeah! We did it! Amanda and I presented our school's journey into the process of inquiry. We were both very nervous, but the content of the presentation was received very well. There were lots of questions, and lots of people wanting further contact for visits and more information! Rock on Poroutawhao! Here is our powerpoint presentation.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: marketing business

2009 is Here!!!!

Welcome to the continuation of Poroutawhao School's inquiry process!
We have begun the year with a unit entitled "Order in the Court", looking at the big question of why do we need rules and laws?
We are exploring this topic with a range of exciting activities including visits from police officers, define maps and looking at Goldilocks and the 3 Bears!
One of our goals for inquiry this year is to make sure our journey's are being recorded in some way ie: blog, books, wall displays.