New year and adapting a new routine in the classroom

After listening to Anaru's workshop last year, I really wanted to incorporate his idea about classroom paepae. He explained how clasroom paepae welcomes everyone in the classroom, celebrates the biculturalism, and settle down the children in the morning for learning.

For my new entrant classroom, I wanted it to be simple and easy to learn for the children. I printed out and laminated the labels that said "kaikarakia" and "kaikorero". In the morning, children might express their interests in being these roles, and I help them with the words that they said. Kaikaraki will greet to the children and start the karakia. At this moment, we are learning the karakia. I say one line and the children repeat after me. Kaikorero thanks the kaikarakia and greet to the children and the teacher and do their pepeha.

It has been really wonderful to have this ritual and everyone respects this time. When we did not do the karakia on one morning because we needed to go to the assembly, one child said "Yoshie, you forgot to do the karakia!" so this tells me that it is a part of us and our day and it also reminded me that we need to do this everyday. If we needed to go somewhere, then we will start the paepae a little bit early so we will have enough time to do this.

I am hoping that we will be able to do this without so much of my help later this term or in term 2. I would love to see our children leading the paepae.

Writing programme

Now I have children who are turning 6 who have the great letter-sound knowledge, can write many words, and construct sentences, I really wanted to provide appropriate support for them to be able to progress in writing.

There are a few things that these children are still working on such as having a finger space between words, having a full stop and writing more than 2 sentences. I has kind of started to be a bit boring as we write about our experiences, these children have been done this a lot, and I needed to do something different to encourage a different way of writing.
After reading the effective writing book, I came across a case study where a teacher read the story called "A lion in the meadow" and this led to the children writing about their mum. I thought this was a really interesting idea and something that our children can easily relate to the topic.
First I read the story, but before reading the story, I told them to think about the mother in the book, "what does she look like?" "what does she sound like?"

After reading the book, we discussed the questions that I asked them before. It was really interesting how the children shared their understanding of the character of the mother.
Then, I asked them to visualise their mum in their heads. Then, I modeled my writing about my mum. I talked about what her hair looked like, how it made me feel when she gave me a hug, and her name.
I wrote down some questions on pieces of paper for the children to reflect on like "What does she smell like?" "What does she sound like?" "what is her name?"
The children wrote their stories, and it was really fantastic to listen to their thoughts about their mum.
There are still many things that the children need to work on like the ones I mentioned earlier, but as a way to create a wonderful topic and to see a great content, this was such a great way to promote writing. I really enjoyed watching them think about how to put their own ideas and writing them down.