A Love of Learning

Term One has flown by and although there has been a lot of disruption, there has still been some amazing work going on in the Kāhui Ako. Teachers across the Kāhui have had their first training day for Storytelling. The training was delivered by Liz Swanson from Storyways Literacy. Teachers commented that the day was fun, educational and that they were excited to start doing storytelling with their own students. We then had an online catch up, where Liz provided more guidance and teachers were able to share what had been going on in their own classrooms. There will be three more twilight sessions to follow throughout the year.

We had our first online literacy meeting with junior school teachers in the Kāhui. There was a fantastic discussion about positives, learnings, challenges with teaching literacy. We were also very appreciative of Jo, from St Anne's for sharing a fantastic Better Start resource and Anna, from St Joseph’s Papanui for sharing her experience of teaching both Better Start and the Structured Literacy Programme.

Jess from St Mary’s has been having lots of fun teaching from the “Te waka o Aoraki” resource and was kind enough to share her and her class’s experience below:

“Using the Aoraki storytelling resources given to us by the Kāhui Ako, our school has really enjoyed exploring this story and its significance to our country's creation. We have explored the story through many different activities, such as adding actions to it, to help us memorise and retell it; making stop motion/claymation movies to retell the story; some characterisation exploration making up stories from the different characters pasts and developing the depth of our knowledge of the characters through this; we have also retold the story in different creative ways such as through a 'radio show', 'TV interview on the news' and rewriting the lyrics to a well-known song.

We've also done a lot of art-based learning: the students have made incredible 3D and mixed media art works of the different scenes from the story, as well as newspaper silhouette art related to the story and of the kupu and TAP/TAPiO sentence structures they have learnt too.

Having this resource has made our staff a lot more confident to teach te reo Māori and the kupu that comes with it. We have two staff who have been taking part in the 'Te ahu o te reo Māori' course. Their knowledge and learning, combined with this resource, has been so valuable to the other staff, giving them people to come to to clarify things. We have been able to take the ideas from the resource and add our own creativity, as well coming up with our own activities for the story, which has been really fun for us all.

We're really grateful to the Kāhui for providing this resource. Our students have been LOVING learning so much more about the stories and are so proud of themselves for the reo they have learnt so far.”