My inquiry presentation

Today I was able to work on my presentation for week 9. I am really proud of what I have done. It might not be as good as most of the other staff but I am happy with how far I have come from my first time -where I held up paper charts and couldn't remember what I said, I was so nervous. I spoke about Travel Buddies, that time ,something I was passionate about. This time its about how I see science at Owhata School and I am passionate about science. I wanted to do this before I actually start my science fellowship next term.

Owhata whanau are great

Room 2 had an open morning on friday and we had 19 extra visitors -Mums, Dads, big brothers and little brothers , aunties and little sisters.
The children introduced their whanau members and we had a wonderful morning with lots of talking and lots and lots of fun.

As part of our inquiry about What Makes a Great New Entrant Room, at the finding out stage, we asked our whanau for their ideas and several said about having times where whanau came into room 2 to take activities and to get to know the other grown ups and family members and we certainly did that on friday.
I want to learn how to put several photos on to SLIDE? so we can share our great morning.Hopefully I can learn this in my blog learning time with L. on thursday.

From the Curriculum

For our term 4 inquiry about the best kind of NE classroom I can find these curriculum 'links'

Social Sciences- Place and Environment - Students learn about how people perceive,represent, interpret and interact with places and their environment.

The Arts- Visual Arts - Investigate visual ideas in response to a variety of motivations, observation and imagination. By this I mean things like the students making models, taking photos, drawing etc as a way of sharing their thinking.

English - Listening, reading , viewing - for finding ideas etc-
-Speaking, writing and Presenting- as ways to share information, ideas, thinking

ICT - use of tools to be part of all of the above and the KC's

Key Competencies now there's an interesting area for planning.

Thinking - "Thinking is about using creative, critical and megacognitive processes to make sense of information, experiences and ideas. Students who are competent thinkers and problem solvers actively seek, use and create knowledge. Do I want this for my students from this unit -YES

Using language, symbols and texts - YES

Managing Self - a can do attitude, self assessing YES

Relating to Others- By working effectively together, they can come up with new approaches, ideas and ways of thinking. YES

Participating and Contributing - its about being actively involved in communities. Communities included whanau, school , other learning places (eg Preschools) - locally, nationally and globally. YES

Term 4 inquiry

I am going to do some brainstorming before planning our term unit as after the trip to Wanganui I now know that HEAPS of work goes in BEFORE the unit starts. L has lend me a book by Kath Murdoch called Classroom connections and it has heaps of easy to follow material for each stage of an inquiry.
Iwill use her headings and read thru her stuff and come up with some of my own.
Tuning in - to find out what students already know, think and feel about the topic. This could be where I do my first assessment as this is where students share their personal experiences and ask questions about the topic.

finding out - to provide shared experiences for all students to process and reflect on and to challenge their prior knowledge and beliefs. Its also about raising more questions as well as providing new information.

sorting out - to provide students with various means of processing and presenting info and ideas from the finding out stage.
going further - to extend and challenge childrens thinking

making connections/conclusions - to assist students to make conclusions and generalisations about the topic and to assess and demonstrate students progress through providing a comparison for students between the ideas generated at the beginning of the unit and now (stage 2 of assessment?)

taking action - to assist students make links between their understandings and their experiences in the real world. To develop an action plan for the school. (SEE Topic later)

sharing,discussion and reflections - to develop skills to report to others, to provide feedback for evaluation purposes about the successful and less successful aspects of the unit

She also has great planning sheets and I need these at the moment as I tend to start with a hiss and a roar and never finish the inquiries properly.
I want this one to work.

The inquiry will come from our term 4 overview about designing a new 'system' to solve a problem at school. I am going to take it further and our unit will be on what would make the best new entrant classroom. Next blog will be after I have had a good look at the curriculum. Oh and I also want the parents to be involved in this unit- how???

Enviroschools

Room 2 and me have the job in the of doing a newsletter for enviroschools. I have asked people for their big ideas (and I have checked the owhata inquiry wiki to see who has posted theirs - so I can see now that r8 (wiki) r5 and r10 have theirs. What I plan to do (so it ties in with inquiry work) is for my kids to ask questions to clarify the big ideas. Room 10 have put in about looking after Papatuanuku and room5 grey water. So this week we will do more work on questions and when we are ready and my children have practised the questions , we will visit the rooms and conduct 'interviews' for our newsletter. I hope it works out- I will need to talk to the 2 teachers first.

east cape

OOps, I pressed the wrong button and I hadn't finished about the East Cape. On Tuesday at school we are to share (just briefly )3 things we got out of the visit. Here are mine (at this stage)
1. The strong yet gentle Maori woman leaders we met. They are proud to be Ngati Porou and it was great to see the support one in particular was getting from her tane. What was extra cool was that 2 of the women had been to Owhata School.

2.For inquiry the schools had made real use of their local resourcesboth physical and people.

3.The importance of the hook in right at the beginning. An example of this was from Hiruharama School for their inquiry on celebrations. Each morning something different happened -a teacher wore her wedding dress, there was a birthady cake next day, etc and the children discussed in class what had happened , but more importantly asked questions.

East Cape

I had a great trip up around the East cape with staff from Owhata, Rotokawa, Lake Rotoma and of course Lorraine.