Our tamariki explore, experiment and seek out all sorts of inspired ways to wonder, understand and learn as they play freely amongst the ngahere. In this unique and natural environment, tamariki are agents of their own learning. Their learning is broad and rapid simply because they are following their own interests, in their own way, at their own pace. Our kaiako are their resources, stepping in when invited, when safety calls or when a tamaiti can be scaffolded to a new level of understanding. Our kaiako are passionate about supporting learning from a dispositional lens, knowing these are the foundations for any future learning. We believe we must think about setting our tamariki up long term, a tamaiti attitude to learning will be with them for the rest of their life and therefore is a vital indicator in their future success. Play is important for health and wellbeing, and essential to the curriculum as it teaches the tamaiti to be creative. Creativity is a big part of what makes us intelligent, and intelligence is essentially the ability to solve problems. If our tamariki are fearless learners and confident in themselves as learners, we don't need to teach them what to think, and we simply can't when we consider what we ourselves don’t even know yet. We can however, teach them how to think, set them up with positive attitudes towards themselves as learners, then they are equipped to confidently take on anything the future has in store for them. Our tamariki are not compared to anyone else, measured against a system of credit or deficit, and their self-esteem and selfbelief are paramount. We pride ourselves on having an assessment system of recognising tamariki strengths, not to identify areas of weakness, but to further promote and encourage their strengths to thrive. Literacy is all through our beautiful curriculum. It is found in our conversations, our rich library of pukapuka, experiencing symbols and text, our researching together, our waiata, our kōrero and questioning. It’s in our dramatic play, pre-writing and mark making. Numeracy is woven throughout our beautiful curriculum. It’s in our heuristic play where we observe tamariki naturally following the urges of patterning and seriation. It’s in counting the trees, estimating the group size, measuring the depth of the water, assessing the length and girth of our eels, the height of our animals, the volume of the mud. It’s in adding our sheep up each spring, and dividing up our bread loaves that March 2024 { 16 }
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