visit to Ramarama School

Today I visited Ramarama School to see a play based class room in action. I came away feeling pretty disappointed in what I had seen, I felt many of the children weren't really engaged in meaningful play and that the environment wasn't really set up to capture children's interests and extend their strengths. This visit helped to affirm my practice and did trigger a few ideas from what I had seen and how I felt I could refine what I am currently doing. I think in would be really valuable to my children if I could provide more of a play based environment by offering sand and water play. I would also like to build up my literacy and math asctivities and to be able to provide more construction type activities. I was able to come away with a few ideas around phonics such as introducing letter sound songs to my class. Aimee and I were able to talk to the principal about her Friday morning tea incentive that she runs school wide which is based around the school values. Each week teachers choose two students each and their names are put in a hat. At the end of the week the 8 children's names are pulled out of the hat and they get to have morning tea with the principal. I could see how this is a great incentive for tamariki and liked the way it focuses on good behaviour and could see it having a positive effect in our school.