Pakirehua in the junior school

By Sharlene Naidoo, Year 1 teacher

I’ve been doing pakirehua in the junior school for quite a few years now and I’m on the inquiry team.  It’s always interesting to adapt our whole school pakirehua focus to the right level for our junior students.  

One of the really important things is to make the learning relevant to the experiences they are already having and the things that they might be doing at home.  For example, we did an inquiry about entrepreneurship where every class was going to develop a product.  We had just had a mufti day and quite a few kids missed out because the notice was squashed in the bottom of their book bags and their whānau never saw it.  The class identified this as a problem we could try and solve.  We thought that if we had somewhere to put our notices when we got home, we would be more likely to put them there instead of leaving them in our book bags. So we designed some fridge magnets, made them and launched them as our product.  The Board of Trustees liked the idea so much they gave us some money to make more so that was really exciting for our kids.  

Another example is when we looked at leadership and what we thought makes a good leader .  We started by looking at leaders the children knew, so we looked at teachers and our head boy and head girl.  The kids could relate to these people because they knew them personally and had regularly seen them as leaders.  We then opened that out wider to look at the leaders of our country, leading up the election, and ended up doing our outcome about Jacinda Ardern.  When she visited our school in 2022 she had her photo taken next to our work.

Our pakirehua work in the juniors is often very hands-on and we try to make things that are durable and will last.  We want them to be able to see their outcomes as they progress through the year groups.  A lot of the learning throughout the inquiry process is practical.  Our inquiry about forces and motion has some big scientific concepts so we needed to make it very experiment based.  We carefully selected activities that the children could do as independently as possible and would fit in with our achievement objectives. While they were doing this we were intentionally introducing new vocabulary so that they could explain what was going on.  We would reinforce this vocabulary through lots of talking and visuals to remind the kids about what we did.  It is really great to hear them use their scientific vocabulary when they explain their learning at our pakirehua celebrations.  Parents also tell us they use their vocabulary at home and can discuss what they have been doing with their siblings who might have been learning about similar concepts in their pakirehua learning in other classes.

Pakirehua in the junior school has all the aspects of pakirehua in other parts of the school but it is especially important that we have a very strong link to the students’ lived experiences and that we do lots of hands on creating and learning.  As teachers we are also very intentional about introducing new vocabulary and empowering the kids to ask questions, explore new ideas and be active participants in their learning throughout their time at Sylvia Park School.