Michelle's Learning

 Day 9 - External recognition day Well.... where have those 9 weeks gone. Who would believe today is our last day with our fellow colleagues. I have learnt so much but I know that my journey is far from complete as I continue to try and put all my theory into practise.  Some of the other things I've enjoyed is having the time to connect with fellow teachers and how they use Learn, Create, Share within their classrooms. I am amazed at what some of the NE's teachers are doing or able to do with their classes. I'm unsure of how I could implement this within my Miro kaiāwhina group due to the different personalities that I have. Would certainly like to discuss this further with Sharon and see what her thoughts are. I've really enjoyed listening to Dorothy's 'chats' regarding how Manaiakalani started and where it has progressed over the years. I absolutely love the quote by Marie Mitchell (as discussed in last week's blog). I feel that if I have this printed ...

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? Learning about the Empowered part of the Manaiakalani kaupapa was really great today. It was interesting to hear how the word Agency was changed to Empowered due to the word association around agencies and how many families have had negative experiences with these services. It was certainly thought-provoking when Dorothy spoke about it being hard for children to feel empowered when not many opportunities are available to them due to financial restrictions. When adults are becoming 'working poor' due to their annual income and how they have to be creative with how they need to pay for their weekly bills etc. How can families be empowered when they want to buy their own homes and not have a home owned by 'the state'? We can see by the statistics of the effects of disempowerment for a five-year-old child that attends a decile one school as their MEAN performance level is of a three-year-...

  What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy? Ubiquitous Learning - Anytime, Anywhere, Anyplace for everyone.  This was interesting to listen to today. I never knew what this meant before and it was certainly helpful to have this explained.  We certainly got to use this in practice when we were in lockdown last year. We also have to remember that by having our lessons/learning on our class site our students can partake outside the 'normal' school hours. In Rongo-mā-tāne we have our weekly plans on our class site and pdf's of our home learning worksheets which whānau may want to use while at home (if the child's pukapuka isn't there). It was so interesting to hear that how children in a decile 1 school child compared to a decile 10 school child can hear 30,000,000 fewer words than their counterparts. I always knew that the statistics were very high but never to this degree. I have certainly seen this at our decile 3 school a...