Te Reo Maori Week

As many New Zealanders will know, this week is Te Reo Maori week. (Maori is the indigenous language of New Zealand.) Each year at our school we have a school wide Maori lesson for every day during this week. In the past it has been done in various ways, but this year one of our ICT lead teachers, Kerry Tetupu, has used her students to present the lessons in a really inventive way!


Korero Mai

Each day's lesson has been made available in video format on the server. Teachers merely have to drag the day's lesson on to their desktop, and show it using the IWBs or dataprojectors that we have in every class. The whole school participates at the same time.

Our students were able to participate in the Waiata, the lesson itself and the karakia at the end. Words of the song and key vocabulary are included, and the presenters have been really good at creating long enough pauses, so that the students watching can interact, and repeat terms and words. They have even used praise and motivation, to encourage their learners! These video's have been scripted, filmed and edited by the children themselves. Each lesson includes a seperate digital story, in the form of a podcast, that was scripted and created by the students themselves. A competition question is asked at the end of each video, and a daily winner for each year group is announced later in the day by that morning's presenters, using our speaker system.

The videos are currently being uploaded onto a wiki, and I will add a link to it as soon as possible.

Well done to Kerry, and to Room 22. Ka Pai!