Sunday 22 February 2015

Ideas for group work in the high school classroom: Wāhanga Rua

Part Two:

I am ready to roll out my groups tomorrow! I feel I know the students well enough and have enough data to group them appropriately. I have decided I will need to review these groups over the rest of the term. I will be satisfied if they are fully established by the start of Term 2.Here is the written instruction I will provide students tomorrow, after I have told them their groups.


Groups groups groups!

Your first project as a group!

1. Choose an abstract noun that will be a goal for your group to work on. You need to find out the English, Maori and any other relevant translations of the word. I will discuss this with your group over the coming week and will help you decide. Think of this as your core value, like Trident's core values of manaakitanga, kia manawa nui and whaia te iti kahurangi. Once you have made your selections Ohinemataroa [our hapu] will potentially have TWENTY core values to strive to fulfill!!

Then either:

2. Suggest a 'patron' of your group. Think Harry Potter and patronuses except different. They must be: a New Zealander and creating the kind of thing we might study in English. So they could be a lyricist, director, author, actor, illustrator... Again, I will help you choose. Our hapu's patron will be Lorde.

OR:

3. Design a flag or sigil for you whanau. Remember that your whanau has up to 30 members across four different classes. How can you best represent those 30 people? Hint: perhaps you could ask me what your other group members have chosen as their core value.

I will be there to help with all of this - it's not a test!


I have also created a poster that will be on my door and probably on the whiteboard. And duh, on my computer's desktop! So the kids will now see this whenever there's no Power Point, video, etc on my projector screen. I'm a genius.



I can take no credit for the creation of the poster. I used the website Canva, literally didn't choose the fonts, found the image on Google Image Search and that's about it. The only thing I came up with was splitting into five. So I'm hoping one of my more artistic students decides to create a more snazzy poster for our hapu. Visual and verbal text credits? Yes please!

I'm sure you can gather from the poster that I have chosen my hapu name as well as the five whanau. Ohinemataroa is the proper Maori name for Whakatane River, and the other five are the surrounding rivers from this region. Some words are supposed to have macrons but unfortunately this font wouldn't recognise the macron-ed symbols.

I'm a little nervous about how the roll out will go, but I think I'll have enough buy in to make it work.

You may have seen my creative writing starters posts and be wondering what that's all about. I plan to talk about them in my next post or so. Suffice to say, my participation in the writing starters seems to be increasing student participation - yay for bribery!


Whāia te iti kahurangi ki te tūohu koe me he maunga teitei
Pursue excellence – should you stumble, let it be to a lofty mountain

1 comment:

Morgan said...

Looking very very organised; impressive. Have I missed a post, one where you talk about buy in? You mention thinking you have enough. Love it that you are embedding the concepts & some language as well as making the values alive. Really love it :)