Sharing: Day 9, Term 3, 2025

Kia ora koutou,

Key reflections from RPI Day 9 are:

Connecting with Manaiakalani | Dorothy: Dorothy highlighted the positive impact of edublogs, explaining how blogging encourages comprehension, creativity, and student voice. She shared examples of learners’ blog work, including book selfies, Google Slides, recordings, and summer learning journeys. Class sites and blogs were identified as the main online spaces to make reading programes visible, while also allowing children to learn new ideas and skills from each other’s work.

Essential components of participating in a community of readers through Learn | Create | Share. Blog detective activity: Find 4 things about Jaxson (I can't remember the prompt exactly- I'm sure it was way more creative and catching!).

Would I use this in class? Yes. I like this activity because it has a clear structure and specific prompts. Tamariki are required to use their listening, reading, and comprehension strategies to complete the task, rather than responding in a random or surface-level way. I find this often happens with commenting on blog posts, so the “blog detective” activity is a nice segue into encouraging thoughtful and quality blog comments.

Visible Reading & Learning. Planning strategically for ‘share’ on learners’ blogs - the what, when, how and why. It’s useful to have students complete a quality check before posting, but since not all work can be checked by teachers, adding a disclaimer such as “This is a working blog, some mahi may not be checked by a teacher and may contain mistakes” helps set expectations.

Collaboration and connection between learners: People cannot get around by ourselves, as we are interdependent, so it is important to support learners to work collaboratively. This includes listening, reading, and responding to others through blog commenting and peer-to-peer feedback. Quality blog comments should be positive, thoughtful, and helpful. Collaboration can also be encouraged through activities such as co-creating responses to texts, taking photos together in the Plastic Planet activity, or creating “how-to” videos in literacy. In reading, collaboration provides further opportunities for shared learning and deeper engagement.

Collaboration in Reading: This was a create task for students to do at home with their parents. Tamariki are to interview their parents at home on Te Koroneihana via google vid and share to their blogs. This is an example of collaborating at home with whānau.  

RPI Overall:

The RPI journey has definitely lived up to it's name (INTENSE), filled with knowledge, learning, activities, and meaningful connections in reading. I have gained a great deal and am confident it will make me a more effective teacher. Highlights for me included exploring critical literacy, responding to texts, fostering reading for enjoyment, and designing creative learning tasks.

I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Naomi, Amie, and Kiri for their excellent facilitation, and to Manaiakalani for creating RPI for us. While the learning has been extensive, I am looking forward to consolidating and applying these insights in practice. Ko te manu e kai ana i te miro, nōnā te ngahere.

Ko te manu e kai ana i te mātauranga, nōnā te ao.

This whakataukī highlights the transformative power of knowledge. Just as a bird is sustained and empowered by the forest’s fruits, a person is empowered by learning, which opens up the wider world—something RPI has done for me.

Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou katoa,

Nā Whaea Tiaira :)

P.S. Check out my certificate!

Creating: Day 8, Term 3, 2025

Creating: Day 8, Term 3, 2025

Phew! We’re coming to the end of the RPI journey, but the speed and volume of learning does not slow down. Future learners, beware…

Today’s overarching theme was “Create.”

Dorothy spoke about the importance of giving learners the opportunity to create, as it engages and empowers them in their learning. I really liked this quote by James Gee (New London Group):

“Don’t empower people to just be consumers but empower them to be producers and creative thinkers.” This is such a great quote and so valid in todays society. My class and I just finished a piece on overconsumption/ fast fashion and how wasteful we are being. It makes you think of how wasteful we are in other areas of life as well. Create tasks help generate this sort of thinking. 

Dorothy also spoke about Sisomo, which stands for sight, sound, and motion. (Fun fact: the guy behind Toyota’s “Bugger” ads goes by SISOMO and uses it in his TV advertising.) With digital tools, we can now create like never before. For example, the podcasting tool in Adobe Express is another great way to support "create" tasks.

Professor Jonathan Neelands, Creative Fellow at Warwick University (England), had some really insightful messages in his video. I missed a few parts, but here’s what stuck with me:

• Mixing people is valuable—it brings variety and different ways of thinking and working.
• We need to do more in the arts, sciences, and technology areas to foster creative thinking and learning.
• This approach will help develop ambitious students—not just for themselves, but for society as a whole.
• STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) continues to play a key role in nurturing creative thinking.

(As the day gets on, there tends to be more create tasks so my note taking starts to look like bullet points instead, as seen below)

Creative thinking: 

• Not being passive about texts but being creative about texts.
• Because of AI- We need critical thinkers to navigate that space i.e. when to spot a fake, scam
• We need to produce and explore these areas so that they can be critical of what they see online
• Learners who have the opportunity to create are more likely to be engaged. 

Recap: 

• What do I need to change? More hands on create tasks and give the students more opportunity to be collaborative (My focus for the next three weeks).
• Engagement and empowerment= why create is so important
• Use looser and tighter ways to design create to learn 
• Opportunities for choice- and collaboration: feedback, co-construct, digital word walls, the chapter examples on a google site rather than on google slides like we are use to is useful for learners being able to work at their own pace. 
• One shot film- Here is my submission about a book title called, "Pitiera by Kiwa Hammond".
• Stencil designs- To go with work about a book for the Koroneihana (Coronation).
• Use remove background to put tamariki into spaces they won't get the opportunity to go to.

See you all on day 9. 

-Tiaira :)
 

RPI Thinking: Day 7, Term 3, 2025

Tēnā koutou, 

Today was another super interesting day delving into the fascinating world of critical thinking. It has always been an area of intrigue for me because of the contentious and interesting nature of the themes and ideas you can get into, but to be honest, I haven't been brave enough to start in class! Day 7 has definitely helped me to make it easier and more achievable.

The core takeaways from today's learning journey were incredibly valuable: we explored the various levels of thinking, gained a deeper understanding of Bloom's Taxonomy and its higher-order thinking skills, and discovered the power of provocations and themes and learning how to do this by "zooming in and out" on ideas using various language features. 

The levels of thinking: Getting tamariki to be able to distinguish questions based on literal, interpretative and evaluative thinking helps to develop deeper levels of thinking. 

Bloom's taxonomy: This video was awesome and made it easy to understand.

What is the theme of your reader? I.e. prejudice, stereotype, gender issues. 

My theme for 'Te Tino Pōtae o Pāpā': Staying true to yourself, individuality? (Not sure about this so feel free to help!) 

Provocations: A statement that provokes critical/ thinking (preferably contentious to arouse juicy discussion). My provocation: "Old, tattered, holey clothes must be thrown out."

See my activity below about pāpā's holey pōtae:

Zooming in and out: 

Zoom in= what language features does the author use to show us this (theme).

Zoom out= What other evidence connects or reinforces the idea of individuality/ staying true to who you are (theme). 

Language features: similes, metaphors, idioms etc.

To conclude, exploring critical literacy, with its rich themes, thought-provoking provocations, and intricate language features, and witnessing how it all fits together, has been one of my favourite RPI days yet! Thank you Naomi and Kiri. 

-Tiaira

DAY 6: Vocabulary (& Decoding)

Tēnā koutou, 

The question below inspired me today following RPI Day 6: Vocabulary (& Decoding). 

What long term plan do you have to systematically develop learners’ knowledge of morphology? 

I would like to start teaching morphology in my program, specifically prefixes, suffixes and root words. I have been exposed to a little bit over the years but it hasn’t been a priority, until now. The RPI space and also BSLA has really exposed this side of learning in my program and I understand the importance of it for our learners to be successful. The challenges that I face are the lack of easily accessible resources in te reo Māori.  

I would like to start with the prefix/kūmua ‘whaka’ and ‘kai’ and introduce root words/ tumu as well. The lessons would be a part of my reading rotations and how I see it working in the future is having a prepared worksheet of words from the text like ‘whakarongo’ and ‘kaiako’. Tamariki then dissects the word into a kūmua and a tumu, they define the two parts and then put the word back together followed by the definition of the word as a whole. See below for an example from 'Paekupu'. 

My ultimate goal is to create generic templates that do not require ongoing work. These templates would have the same instruction on them and ākonga would apply the learning to the text of the week. For example: identify 5 kupu in this text that have a kūmua + tumu. Define the two then define the word as a whole. Tamariki then create a poster on google drawings and then share it to their blogs. This would become a normal weekly activity.  

Another goal of mine after day 6 is to start a word wall. 

Homework is starting to become strenuous but the flip side of that is I am using the content for my Class on Air Episodes so as to not let it go to waste. So, two birds-one stone! 

See you all on Day 7, 

Tiaira. 

Day 5 RPI Homework: Practice Implementation

The above shows my interpretation of incorporating independent activities into my papa mahi or task boards. You will see this in the 'kōwhiringa' section, located at the bottom right-hand side of the task board. My independent tasks include creative activities such as tāoreore (animation), pānui whakaahua (poster), and pixel art.

Although these may not be considered 'high-expectation independent activities' like those on the Epic website, they serve as a placeholder for better things to come (fingers crossed!). As I mentioned in my last blog post, many of the independent activities recommended on RPI Day 5 were in English, which means they don't apply in my kura.

I’ve been discussing with my mentor ways to incorporate high-expectation activities into my timetable—but they require me to create them myself... (sigh). If there are other examples of what teachers in other kura have done, I’d love to hear from you!

Day 5: Planning a Reading Programme

Day 5: Planning a Reading Programme

Dorothy: Connecting with Manaiakalani
Dorothy started her session by talking about ubiquitous learning—how technology now allows students to learn anytime, anywhere. She linked this to multimodal learning, pointing out the value of using different types of content, like videos, newspaper articles, and written texts etc, to make learning more engaging. Dorothy also shared a story about asking a few younger students what they were learning, and they couldn’t really explain it. She went on to say share how important it is to go over the learning intentions and success criteria with our students, and how even casual conversations with students can help us check their understanding of the purpose.

TIMETABLES/ PLANNING:
I really enjoyed going over the timetables and planning and seeing examples of what other teachers are doing. Seeing as I am new to this role (teaching year 8's), this section of the RPI is definitely an area I NEED to improve on. Prior to joining RPI, I used a timetable to show my students what to do and where to go. Since joining RPI, I have been introduced to a task board so the goal now is to migrate from a timetable to the task board. See below: 

Timetable:

Task board: 

Other main take aways from todays session: 

• Mahi tracker: Seeing other examples was great, however, I do like the more simple ones. 

• Read Like Writers: Write Like Readers: The activity we did today was great! Writing is an area I need more support in so seeing examples like this broken down is very helpful. 

• Lack of Māori resources: There were times in todays session that required us to explore different websites like epic and readworks but these do not come in Te Reo Māori which meant that I would need to do a lot of work for it to be beneficial for my students and I. I wonder if there are websites out there similar to epic and readwords that are in Te Reo? I only know of Kauwhata Reo, which don't quite do what epic and readworks do.

Overall, today's session was incredibly valuable and truly inspiring! I always come away having learned so much. While the information can be challenging in the best way, the learning opportunities they provide are outstanding. Thank you! 

APRIL ICF ENERGISER WITH MARIA 2025

Tēnā koutou katoa, 

Today I joined the Google Vids group hosted by the wonderful Maria. I have had some basic practice with google vids but today I played around with adding music to my video. Here I am playing around with sequential cooking pictures.

Another thing that I enjoyed was learning about the avatars on Adobe Express. A lot of tamariki are shy to record their faces in videos while reading so this will be an alternative for those students. I thought I could use the avatars on adobe for rewindable learning and interactive tools on my class site. 

Negatives: Adobe is slow. The search function for images doesn't give you want you want.. not accurate. 

Mauri ora!