The Montessori Way

I am interested in Montessori education in NZ.
A Montessori classroom sounds like a blissfully calm, creative, safe learning place where children can learn at their own pace and discover things naturally with guidance and whilst being skillfully observed. Children can work together, collaboratively, with cleverly designed learning materials suitable to their stage of development. 
Check out these links to discover more of the world of child-centred, caring, observational, educational guidance that is the Montessori way:

Eight Stages of Observation

Four stages of Classroom Management

Montessori in NZ

A Kiwi Montessori Classroom

Matariki Mysteries

Mr Woody wants to know more about Matariki. Which school will be the best at informing him?
Today St Andrews have a head start. Can anyone beat them?
Answer my questions on your own blogs and leave me a comment here telling me something you've learned. I will then visit your blog and check out what you have discovered for me. Please create a quality post on your blog with information written in your own words to answer my questions. Also include anything interesting you find out. Then put the url's of your internet sources after each fact you include.
I bet no one can achieve this!
Who will be best? Peachgrove? St Andrews? Tahaaroa?

Questions:

1. What is Matariki and what are all its other names?
2. How did Maori use it in more traditional times, like when they were travelling the Pacific or trying to survive in early Aotearoa hundreds of years ago before Pakeha came here?
3. What significance does it have in other cultures from history?

Ask your teachers for help to understand these questions if you need to.

Good luck!

Sustainable Room5ians

Room5ians have expressed an interest in sustainable farming, growing 'clean, green' food and raising free range organic chickens for eggs.

If we can plan and implement a realistic programme for developing an area of the school as an organic, sustainable "farmlet", and we are prepared to stick with it and follow it through, we have permission to do so.

Please state all the positives, potential barriers, solutions and innovative ideas you have.

Why should we? How can we? Do you want to? What will we do to make it happen?

Add as much information here as possible and make posts on your own blogs to add further info. If we really want to we can make this happen.

Go for it!

Enviroschools philosophy is:

"Imagine...a generation of innovative and motivated young people, who instinctively think and act sustainably.
Enviroschools is working towards this vision through a whole school approach to environmental education. Students develop skills, understanding, knowledge and confidence through planning, designing and creating a sustainable school. Action projects undertaken by enviroschools have both environmental and educational outcomes that benefit the school and the wider community."

notes and links for teachers - inquiry and web2.0

relating to web2.0, "school2.0", inquiry learning, and all that stuff ;>)
it is a range of opinions aggregated from other sources.
hopefully teachers will agree these thoughts are worth a browse.


* I believe that "school 2.0" as discussed by David Warlick, [keynote speaker from the recent Learngin @ schools conference] is a necessity in our 'switched on' world...



* "personalised learning" - not exactly new, but an ideal concept for today's/tomorrow's learners.

paradigm change - new world, new needs, need for change - personalised learning



* wiki learning commons by Pam Hook

"Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge."-- Alfred North Whitehead

readings: http://learningcommons.wikispaces.com/Readings


* "As schools struggle with the changed circumstances of the world beyond their gates, there has been a growing interest in and use of terms like real, authentic and relevant. In many instances their use in labelling routine classroom practices is more of an instance of wishful naming. That is the name is given to practices that gesture towards something beyond the classroom or may even involve activity that takes students to settings outside school but the design sensibility, the bias, if you like, remains one of doing safe or pretend work."



* “It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to rack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the engagement of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.” --Albert Einstein

from http://www.deakin.edu.au/education/lit/kps/concept.html