Rich Learning Opportunities

School camps and field trips are a great opportunity to centre a rich learning experience.  They are a fabulous way of connecting with our local community, local history and culture, work out where we fit in the world immediately around us and globally?  We can find out about the stories of our tipuna, so we can pass them on to our tamariki and our mokopuna.  We can make the connections that help us to form our identity and understand our world.  We can do all that and also be active, outdoors, developing our hauora and working collaboratively with each other and learning together?

Storytelling is the age old way that matauranga or knowledge is passed on.  There are multiple ways that stories are told.  Just think about all the ways that you have learned over the years. Sadly, though, some of the traditional ways of telling stories are no longer perceived to be as important. The pen has taken over from the tongue and other visual means of telling stories.    Tamariki learn the stories of their world through songs, poems, dance, carving, weaving, sculpture, drawing and painting.  

As technology has progressed, there are even more ways of sharing those stories and other methods for telling stories.  Records, tapes, CDs, radio, TV,  photography, film are fabulous ways of capturing stories so that they can be kept and retold over and over again.  Digital technologies have brought even more opportunities.   

I am an avid photographer and so have made countless photo stories but another tool I love is how we can combine photos, voice, word, art in to a map, that can trace the origins of a story and take us on a journey through time.