Each of the students was encouraged to draw a Whanau/'iaga/Family Tree that shows the relationships between them and those closest to them. They were then asked to identify those members of their families who they consider to be their family leaders. This will become important as we look forward to next week and start to discuss the qualities of a leader, and those leaders in the community that we admire or challenge our thinking.
We also spent some time talking about how we want to spend our time together, and how we can best support each others learning.
Te rangi tahi: Together we grow.
As a group, we wrote our ideas down on our whiteboard table:
We then started creating our own Learning Maps. These maps are visual representations of how we learn, who we learn from, and where we like to learn. The students recorded their learning flow using arrows. Arrows pointing in towards them showed the people who helped them learn, while arrows coming away from them showed how they help others to learn. This was a really valuable activity and it showed me that most of these students had not thought about how they learn best. We will investigate this some more next week.
Our third activity was to start thinking critically about writing. The students were asked to complete this task individually, and work through a series of questions as honestly as they could. It was really interesting to see that what one student wrote, was often common across other students in the group. The students identified that they want to learn the following:
- How to start their writing in different ways
- Different ways to continue their writing
- The chance to finish their work
- How they can include descriptive words in their writing
- How to use punctuation correctly in their writing
I have assured the students that we will work on this, and much more over the next 15 weeks!
To finish the day, we each wrote an "I am ..." poem that captures our thoughts, feelings and personalities. These were such great pieces of writing that I used them to create the first Display in Room 26. I will email a copy of your child's individual poems to each of you, so you can celebrate their great work too!
I look forward to working with you all again, next week!
