Curriculum

Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories are being incorporated into the national curriculum to ensure that all ākonga in all schools and kura learn how our histories have shaped our lives.

Me mātai whakamuri, kia anga whakamua
To shape New Zealand’s future, let’s start with the past.

Public engagement on the draft Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories curriculum content is now underway. The public consultation will run from 3 February to 31 May 2021:

Read the Aotearoa New Zealand’s histories: NZ Curriculum draft for consultation

Ngaio School Learning Journey Timeline

The primary purpose of assessment is to improve students’ learning and teachers’ teaching, as both student and teacher respond to the information that it provides.

NZC pg 39.

At Ngaio School we gather a range of information which is reflected in the Healthy Assessment Diagram. The assessment tools we use at Ngaio School are 5 year old and 6 year old Observation Survey, e-asTTle Writing Reading & Mathematics, STAR, PAT (Maths), Junior School Mathematics Assessment, GloSS, running records and Essential Spelling List testing.

For some students we use additional assessment tools to gain further insight into their learning and progress. Healthy assessment for learning is reflected in the classroom conversations as students and teachers discuss their learning and progress and set goals for their next learning steps. Ongoing observations and conversations between students, teachers and teams inform planning, monitoring and reporting of learning and progress.

Written Reports
Parents receive written reports mid and end of year. The mid year report shows how the child is progressing toward meeting the curriculum expectations for their year level. The end of year report shows how the child has achieved against the curriculum for their year level. The written content provides a summary of learning highlights and where appropriate, next steps for learning.

Conferences
A mid-year conference follows the mid year written report. Teachers support students to showcase their learning by sharing examples of work, noting achievements, discussing next learning steps and unpacking assessment information where appropriate.

Parents are notified in advance about when these conferences are held and how to make an appointment via our School Interview System online.

Sharing Times
Throughout the year parents are invited into classrooms to view student learning. This is another way of parents engaging with their child’s learning journey.

Ngaio School believes in a Digital Citizenship model for supporting safe and responsible use of the internet in teaching and learning.

In line with this belief, we ask all staff, students and volunteers to commit to using the internet and associated technologies in a safe and responsible manner by completing responsible use agreement.

Staff commit to the Ngaio School Cybersafety & Device Use Procedures when they complete the Ngaio School Teacher Cyber Safety and Device User Agreement.

Teachers guide students in the use of the internet and devices with support of Netsafe resources and students complete either:

Cybersafety & Device Use Agreement Years 0-3 (as a class), or
Cybersafety & Device Use Agreement Years 4-6 (individually)

Our school procedures are based on good practice and advice from Netsafe.
Ngaio School also has the following policies relating to device use:

• Digital technology and cybersafety
• Staff social media
• Community social media
• Computer Security and Cybersecurity
• Phishing
• Cyberbullying
• Responding to Digital Incidents
• Privacy

These policies can be accessed through the School Docs site [username: Ngaio, password: abbott].

Please see our Digital Learning Across the School document to understand how devices are used throughout your child’s syndicate.

Discovery is an opportunity to explore, learn and develop curiosity through hands-on experiences, for children in years 0-1, our Kōwhai syndicate. 

Discovery time happens once a week in every Kōwhai classroom. Teachers provide a variety of opportunities that extend children’s experiences across the curriculum.  Each term, there is a different curriculum focus.

Activities include: construction, technology, arts, crafts, manipulation, scientific experiments and observations. Additionally, children are provided with activities that promote the development of fine and gross motor skills. Teachers work alongside children to encourage social skills.

Parents are welcome to assist classroom teachers. Please contact your child’s teacher to register your interest.

Teachers differentiate their classroom programmes to meet the learning needs of all students.  Sometimes, additional support or opportunities are provided to meet a wide range student needs and interests.  Students are identified using a range of information and observations gathered by teachers.

Within syndicates opportunities to extend learning are offered, including specific grouping and extension programmes.

In health and physical education, the focus is on the well-being of the students themselves, of other people, and of society through learning in health-related and movement contexts.

Four underlying and interdependent concepts are at the heart of this learning area:

• Hauora – a Māori philosophy of well-being that includes the dimensions taha wairua, taha hinengaro, taha tinana, and taha whānau, each one influencing and supporting the others.
• Attitudes and values – a positive, responsible attitude on the part of students to their own well-being; respect, care, and concern for other people and the environment; and a sense of social justice.
• The socio-ecological perspective – a way of viewing and understanding the interrelationships that exist between the individual, others, and society.
• Health promotion – a process that helps to develop and maintain supportive physical and emotional environments and that involves students in personal and collective action.

Through learning and by accepting challenges in health-related and movement contexts, students reflect on the nature of well-being and how to promote it. As they develop resilience and a sense of personal and social responsibility, they are increasingly able to take responsibility for themselves and contribute to the well-being of those around them, of their communities, of their environments (including natural environments), and of the wider society.

At Ngaio School we use the Sportstart Programme to support the teaching of Physical Education.

Ngaio School Health Statement 2023

As active learners, children will develop strategies to be able to ask questions, seek information, share what they have learnt and evaluate their learning.

Teachers at Ngaio School plan collaboratively to set a termly “I am…” focus extending from a main curriculum area. The four term “I am…” focus topics are agreed the previous school year after consultation with the whole teaching staff in a full staff meeting. Ideas are mapped against curriculum coverage and are explored further by the Curriculum Team and Syndicates before a final decision is made. The benefits of using the “I am a…” termly planning model include:

Widening the scope and potential to meet the Principles of the NZC
“These principles put students at the centre of teaching and learning, asserting that they should experience a curriculum that engages and challenges them, is forward-looking and inclusive, and affirms New Zealand’s unique identity.” Syndicates can personalise their learning programmes while still remaining in alignment with the wider school.

Opportunity for student voice
Whole school planning is done in advance allowing time to capture students’ voice. Including student ideas in planning is both empowering and motivating. Students can control the direction of their own learning and allow time to ‘focus’ rather than ‘skim the surface’ of learning ideas.

Curriculum coverage
The termly “I am a…” allows for topics to be explored broadly and/or in depth. As a school curriculum coverage can be tracked and monitored to ensure a balanced curriculum is being delivered.

Links to wider events can be incorporated into the term focus rather than being an ‘add-on’. This provides greater context for events e.g. Olympics, elections, matariki. Incorporating major events in this way creates potential for school wide events e.g. Olympic fun day or Olympic dress up day.

Allows more easily for curriculum integration unlocking the potential for termly “I am a…” to launch into more than one direction so learning can cater for diverse needs, interests and abilities.

Teachers differentiate their classroom programmes to meet the learning needs of all students.  Sometimes, additional learning support is required to accelerate progress.  Students are identified using a range of information and observations gathered by teachers.  All students receiving additional learning support are closely monitored.

Literacy supports include:

• 1 – 1 learning with a Literacy Support teacher
• Quick-60
• Reading Recovery
• Hooked on Words & Hooked on Books
• LLI (speech and language)

Numeracy supports include:

• Spring Into Maths
• Basic Facts Buddy System

Social Supports include:

• Lego Therapy
• Bounce Back resilience programme
• Peer Mediators
• Buddy Reading

We have a dedicated group of Teacher Aides working alongside our school Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCo)  and classroom teachers to provide 1-1 and small group support for learners requiring specific targeted activities.

Literacy is integrated across the curriculum so children have wide ranging opportunities to practice their learning.

Understanding, using, and creating oral, written, and visual texts of increasing complexity is at the heart of our literacy programmes. By engaging with text-based activities, students become increasingly skilled and sophisticated speakers and listeners, writers and readers, presenters and viewers.

Students begin reading and writing from their first day at school. Teachers build on the literacy knowledge, skills, and attitudes that students bring to their school learning. In Year 1, much of the school day revolves around literacy. Teachers provide many opportunities for students to read and write independently and to engage in purposeful literacy tasks.

Focused teaching and many opportunities to engage in talk help students’ oral vocabularies to keep expanding rapidly. Students enjoy identifying and using new words, phrases, and language patterns that they discover in the books and poems they hear or read. They are constantly refining their ability to aurally distinguish sounds in spoken words.

Instructional reading books are carefully levelled and provide a gradient of difficulty to support students in developing effective reading processing systems. As students read these texts, teachers help them to draw on their oral language, and on understandings gained from their writing, as they acquire and consolidate basic reading skills and knowledge of letters and sounds. Students have many opportunities for independent reading to strengthen their reading processing systems.

In their second year at school, students are engaging with a wide variety of texts for a number of purposes. They are reading longer texts with increasing independence and with appropriate intonation, expression, and phrasing. With teacher guidance, students draw on a wider range of comprehension strategies to help them think more deeply about what they read.

In their third year at school, students are beginning to use texts to meet the demands of learning across the curriculum as well as for instructional reading purposes. They confidently use a range of processing and comprehension strategies to make meaning from and think critically about longer and more complex texts.

Students in year 4 are reading texts for instructional reading purposes, and they are also increasingly required to use texts to meet the demands of the curriculum as an integral part of their regular classroom programme. Students read texts in order to locate and evaluate information and ideas about a range of subjects as they generate and answer questions to meet specific learning purposes.

The transition into year 5 brings with it a significant step up in terms of the demand for students to use their reading as an interactive tool for learning. Although they continue to read texts as part of their literacy learning programme, most of the texts that students are now required to read are instructional materials from across the curriculum. The texts and tasks are similar for students in year 5 and year 6. Students read in order to locate, evaluate, and integrate information and ideas within and across a small range of texts as they generate and answer questions to meet specific learning purposes across the curriculum.

During these two years, students continue to develop their accuracy and fluency as readers of a variety of texts. They increase their level of control and independence in selecting strategies for using texts to support their learning. By the end of year 6, students are required to read longer texts more quickly and to select appropriate strategies for different reading purposes more effectively than students in year 5.

Writing

In their first year of school, students create many texts for a range of purposes across the curriculum. They plan for writing, using talk and pictures, and they attempt to record their ideas and experiences in print.

At first, there is a high level of scaffolding as teachers help students to:

• hold an idea in their head long enough to write it down
• say, hear, and record the predominant sounds in the words they want to write
• write from left to right and leave spaces between words
• form letters accurately.

Gradually, the support alters as teachers help students to build and strengthen their processing systems and to create longer, more complex texts. Students in the first year of school are becoming increasingly aware of the purposes for their writing, and they use a range of text forms. They can express their ideas in increasingly interesting ways as they gain control over using more complex language structures, including varied ways of beginning sentences.

In their second year at school, students create texts for instructional writing purposes as well as to support their other learning across the curriculum. They write in order to think about, record, and communicate experiences, ideas, and information that relate to a curriculum topic.

In their third year at school, students create texts for instructional writing purposes as well as to meet other learning purposes across the curriculum. They write in order to think about, record, and communicate experiences, ideas, and information.

After three years at school, students independently create texts using a process that will help them achieve their specific purpose for writing. Where appropriate, their texts are clearly directed to a particular audience through appropriate choice of content, language, and text form.

The transition into year 5 brings with it a significant step up in terms of the demand for students to use their writing as an interactive tool for learning. Although they continue to create texts as part of their instructional writing programme, most of the texts that students are required to write in years 5 and 6 are intended to meet the demands of the curriculum. The texts and tasks are similar for students in year 5 and year 6. They use their writing to think about, record, and communicate experiences, ideas, and information to meet specific learning purposes across the curriculum.

During these two years, students write about increasingly challenging subject matter. They increase their level of control and independence in selecting processes and strategies to write texts for a range of purposes that includes recounting, describing, narrating, reporting, arguing, and explaining. By the end of year 6, students are required to write more complex texts than students in year 5. They independently create texts that are appropriate for their purposes and audiences, choosing effective content, language, and text structures.

Mathematics is the exploration of patterns and relationships in quantities, space and time. Statistics is the exploration and use of patterns and relationships in data.

We work to ensure children are equipped with the means to effectively investigate, explain and make sense of the world they live in, in mathematical contexts.

By studying mathematics and statistics, children develop the ability to think creatively, critically, strategically, and logically. They learn to structure and to organise, to carry out procedures flexibly and accurately, to process and communicate information, and to enjoy intellectual challenges.

Science is a way of investigating, understanding, and explaining our natural, physical world and the wider universe.

Through scientific enquiry, we are developing the following scientific capabilities in our children:

The technology learning area has three strands: Technological Practice, Technological Knowledge, and Nature of Technology. These three strands are embedded within each of five technological areas:

• Computational thinking for digital technologies
• Designing and developing digital outcomes
• Designing and developing materials outcomes
• Designing and developing processed outcomes
• Design and visual communication.

The digital technology curriculum is integrated with literacy, numeracy and discovery throughout  our ‘I am’ integrated topics throughout the year. Students are supported to develop their problem solving and designing skills. They will be taught command functions for efficiency. They will also look at identifying key words and paraphrasing in text to be able to research. These keywords will link to develop vocabulary through reading and writing. 

The children learn to use the Google Suite and how to save their work. They learn to share docs and develop their presentation skills through slides, adding links, referencing and using skills learned in infographics in literacy to present their learning digitally. 

Children use Seesaw to share learning with families. Hapara is used to save and access work on the children’s Google Drive and Workspace.

Akōnga involved in the Coding Club explore basic coding functions on ‘Scratch’ and present their learning to buddies in their classes.

All akōnga at Ngaio School receive te reo Māori and tikanga lessons within the classroom programmes. Te reo and tikanga are integrated into the wider curriculum, including our ‘I am a’ integrated topics. Akōnga practice kupu daily, integrating new vocabulary with a variety of sentence structures and a  focus on grammar.

Akōnga participate in weekly Kapa Haka sessions, learning waiata, karakia, haka and poi. They have the option to join the extension kapa haka group who practise weekly and perform at assemblies and other special occasions. Every year this Kapa Haka group perform in the St Brigid’s Kapa Haka Festival.

Each term we hold a whakatau to welcome new staff, children and their families to Ngaio School.

We provide opportunities for children to engage in a range of artistic experiences in music, drama, dance and visual arts.

We provide children with a range of experiences in visual art, music, drama and dance including: