Lyn

What a great Cluster Day we had last week. Our visit to Pt England School was so inspirational. This Decile 1a school has developed such an amazing learning environment for their children.

Working in Decile 1 myself, I understand the challenges of motivating these children to want to raise their achievement levels, and the pressures under which teachers work to do so. I have always believed that all children can be inspired to learn and see a successful future for themselves, and at Pt England we saw a shining example of motivated, achieving students.

We were able to see first-hand the impact effective ICT integration has on their learning. The children were all fully engaged, despite having a large group of visitors in their rooms, and very keen to share their learning experiences with us, and were very aware of what and why they were learning.

The classroom environments also reflected the strong emphasis on achievement, and were such rich learning spaces. No wonder the children all looked happy to be at school!

I returned to our school excited to share my Pt England experience with our teachers. I know that if I can arrange for them to visit this amazing school, that they too will return to their classrooms with renewed vigour and hope!!

Many, many thanks to Dorothy and everyone else at Pt England for such an inspirational morning.

Our small staff enthusiastically undertook the task of investigating the inquiry models that they had chosen, and produced informative Power Point presentations reflecting on their findings. As a group we all felt that during the exercise we had learnt a lot about the inquiry process and we’re all feeling a lot more confident about building a model that will suit Waimokoia. One of our challenges is that children are at our school for only 4 school terms, meaning that we will always be introducing the model to new students, without the long-term carry over that is possible in mainstream schools. I am sure we will overcome this hurdle when we get down to the actually developing our own model. The experience of other low-decile schools will also inform our decisions as they too often have children regularly “coming and going”. We look forward to the journey and are very grateful for the knowledgeable support of Belinda, our facilitator. 

Our teachers are enthusiastically embracing the use of ICT tools in their classrooms. Two of them, plus a student teacher who was with them last week, were lucky enough to visit Amanda at Elm Park, to see her using her interactive whiteboard with her class. They returned very motivated and enthusiastically introduced some of the things they learned to their class on Monday of this week. It is wonderful that within our cluster there are so many talented people who are willing to share their knowledge with others. Many thanks Amanda.

A whole new world is opening up to me through blogging. I have never been inclined to share my thoughts and learning with anyone other than my family, friends or colleagues, but I intend to try!!