Belonging has been our overarching theme at Newmarket School for 2019.

The concept was developed by our student leaders in the curriculum development team.

I wanted to share some exciting developments that happened with the team I worked with this term. 

I had been playing with Book Creator and was impressed with the ease of creating and wondered if I could persuade the team to use it as a platform to develop writing.

I created a writing unit framed using SOLO Taxonomy and the key idea was to have our children write their migrant journey to New Zealand or a close family member. 

When I first approached our teachers with the idea, I suggested that in order for the project to work, they themselves must also create a migrant story about themselves or a family member. They must also use book creator to craft their story so they could experience that challenges their learners might have with the app. I shared my own journey to New Zealand that could be used as a model by both teachers and children. 

Link to my story

I applied for and gained book creator ambassador status and this opened up further ideas for collaboration. 

Another idea was for each teacher to share the code to their class library so that all teachers could learn from each other. This they did.

Teachers used Seesaw to communicate with families. Most of the images came in this way for the children. Some teachers created a page in Google Docs and saved the families links there. That was so the children were then able to access their images. For art the children created patterns from countries that they associate with and this was also included in their books. They also included a reflection on the art process.

All in all, the unit of work was successful. We learned so much about who we all are, belonging, and the diverse cultures that make up our school.

Our families gave us positive feedback because the children came home and asked so many questions that conversations around family photo albums were animated and exciting.

In addition several families needed to contact extended families overseas for further clarification for some information.

When the books were completed, we printed out one paper copy for each child and also shared the digital copies with families in a hidden link via Seesaw. 

As an added bonus, I was also able to cocreate a story book with some of the children about the area that we live in. They created all the images using the new drawing tool. The book is called ‘The Patupaihere of Tāmaki Makaurau’ and retells the story of how the mountains appeared in Auckland.

Where to next: I cannot stress enough the importance of going through the learning yourself first as a teacher. Two parts of the learning included: ‘How to write a recount’ and ‘How to learn to use Book Creator’. In addition, be really clear about driving the learning deeper and I do this using SOLO Taxonomy. Finally remember to leave time to reflect on the process. I can hear Ginny now, “Where is the SOLO Taxonomy rubric?”