Jane Clifford Professional Blog

I attended the NZEI Pasifika Fono here in Christchurch 29th and 30th April.  The Key note speakers Daisy Lavea-Timo and Tusiata Avia moved me to tears. Big take aways were the importance of children knowing about their culture, their own personal ancestral history and place. The need to create 'space' for talanoa, learning and expression of cultural values. Also to talanoa with Pasifika community in the right way (see slide below). In other words, invite for a talanoa and people can share their own backgrounds rather than directly answer questions from school leaders. (Use slideshow from Karl Vasau's Workshop). The theme for Fono is  Na leo i Ko'olau Na leo i Ko’olau honours the voices of our ancestors whose knowledge, wisdom, shoulders we stand on. Na leo i Ko’olau honours where we come from and who we come from. Na leo i Ko’olau reminds us that there are many compass points we, as wayfinders, can set sail towards. A beautiful account of the two day Fono is here on the...

 Using a template from our bilingual unit kaiako, students collected information from home for their pepeha. We made visual pepeha, so the images would support the ongoing learning of the kupu. This worked very well. The students made them first, and are now learning to say them correctly. This has been a great experience connecting children with their cultural roots and it was easy to have maunga and awa from other countries.  Churches and other meeting places can replace marae too.  Students have learned a lot and are expressing a huge interest and ownership of their pepeha information. Each pepeha was checked by our bilingual kaiako.

Thirty students from our Pasifika Group performed at the International Foods and Culture Night held on the last Wednesday of term at Hornby High School. I t was inspiring and exciting for our children to see older students and adults performing their cultural dances. It turned into quite a cool evening, but the event was busy and vibrant with so many warm hearts. We had lovely compliments from the community for the quality of our performance, and for our school's commitment to celebrating our Pasifika Cultures.

  The Wild Robot by Peter Brown was the first book of the year to be studied through the -free to join- group 'Chapter Chat'.  I chose to join Chapter Chat as I was changing class level, and wanted to ensure a great quality novel for my year 4/5 class. Another reason was that Chapter Chat provides questions, ideas and activities that prompt deeper thinking, and in particular,  interesting and motivating ways for students to respond to texts. Due to swimming and buddy class commitments this book took us all term to read. So we did not keep up with the Chapter Chats timetable. However, once we really got into the book, (which took a week or two), the entire class loved it and voted to read the sequel book next term.  The Wild Robot explores themes of friendship, resilience, curiosity and creativity. The children were very interested in all the many animals that lived on the island, and were wanting to research them further. The book felt as though it were designed to...