Faith, hope AND love

Talofa lava i le au maimoa, au tapua'i o le tatou galuega fai faatasi i totonu o aoga a Niu Sila!

Today I greet you from my role of 'Acting Assistant Principal' - one of three for Point England School.  2 - 3 months old.  To return to team leader of Team 5 end of term 4 2019.

This is a sharing of some of what I have been led to focus on so far in this new role.

I've met a number of professionals that belong to different organisations/agencies.  They have shared important information relating to their specialist work.  The passion and love for their work is obvious.  I've also had many opportunities in my short 3 months to observe with a different lense - the gifted and talented staff we have here at Pt England.   Our management team - wow!

This place is full of those who love our tamariki.  When exchanging or for me mostly receiving information about best ways to support individual students, I have picked up on something that I feel we add to love.  One learning so far:  The act of having faith, hope AND love in our children and whanau.

When there is faith and hope along with love we are prepared to try things again and again, try things differently, ask questions, share information in the faith and hope that things can and will be better.  It's at the heart of what we do.  We have faith and hope that what we plant today will grow and bear fruit.  For me it's been a mixture of seeing the fruit during the time I've had the students in my class and more - later in life as college students, young adults and parent life.

Faith, hope AND love.

Lift lift, lifting reading higher (for our 'Tama').

This term my inquiry will be based upon this strand of the COL Achievement Challenge
Lift the achievement in Reading for all students, with a particular focus on boys and Māori students (both genders) years 1-13

Very clear messages were received in our most recent researchers report. We need to provide more opportunities for our students to simply read - that's right independently read. While learning experiences via activities and creative task help to embed new learning - the action of reading for a decent chunk of time is valuable too!

Core learning area (our of 3) I am inquiring into
Reading
Writing
Maths

2. The lenses I intend to use: I have highlighted 2 as I will consider these two strands when supporting learners in this inquiry. I am tempted to highlight all!
Learning Behaviour/ Managing Self/ Setting of Norms
Cultural Responsiveness
Wellbeing/ Hauora
Language Acquisition

Here is my actual inquiry along with ideas and strategies I have so far.

Inquiry Focus Inquiry Question

Reading mileage for boys will increase when boys are coached to and regularly checked in with reading mileage in and out of school

Possible Strategies Hunches What might work? What can I try? Ideas to investigate

Visit local libraries to engage with people and other resources that can support choice making around texts to read Join online TC library, set a goal of one book a week for those who take chromebooks home.  Issue for home those who do not take chromebook Notice home to engage whanau around increasing reading mileage for boys, have a signed system daily Have a set group that includes girl readers who have not shifted in year

Action Plan - See Journey on Blog

What steps am I going to take to change my practice?	Mid year Reflection	End year Reflection
Work in actual lesson time to visit our school library, surf through TC online library and actual time to READ during week.   Do I need to consider furniture? Private areas for hard to focus students?	To come	To come

What do you want a PES student to leave our school with? We've started!

What do you want a PES student to leave our school with?This is the question we asked ourselves in our very first team meet for 2019!
 Our meeting had us
 a. sharing holiday highlights
b.teacher reflections from end of 2018
c.goals that stem from reflection for 2019
d.what do we want our PES students leaving PES with when heading to college?

 A very productive meeting where we organised ourselves in regards to classroom operations BUT also reminded ourselves of the WHY behind what we do in Team 5. Why we have what we have...why we have all the extensions to the programme like

• school wide values 'Kindness...better together etc'
•  special reading groups
•  sports teams and programmes
•  tech@Tamaki
• recycling and reusing
• student leaders aspiring leaders
• PENN
• school korero
• Te Reo 
• karakia and himene
• class treaty
• ways of talking and listening and so much more.

 These are all part of achieving the goal of having students who possess the traits, values and characteristics stated in our hand drawn images here. Yes we even drew in our meeting this morning! Here's to 2019! Looking forward to working with our awesome Team 5 teachers!