Bay of Islands – Don Long's Rural Residency

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

This two-week rural residency in three year 1-8 schools in Paihia, Opua, and Russell got off to a great start today with the first sessions at Paihia and Opua.

(The first session at Russell is tomorrow.)

There were lots of positive comments about the terrific work Emma has put to ensure that all the arrangements are in place. Margaret Lange, the teacher at Opua, for example, mentioned how positive “the whole experience has been in the lead-up to this residency commencing”.

In the weeks before the residency, each school developed a two-page project plan. It was great to have the opportunity to contribute to these as the schools developed them.

Once I knew the broad outlines of what each school wanted to do, I was able to collaborate with the three teachers and develop more detailed session planning with them. In our more detailed session planning, we made specific references to some of the key competencies and writing indicators in The New Zealand Curriculum.

For a group of year 4 and 5 students in Room 5 at Paihia School, their teacher Adam Hogg has asked me to help his students to write a reader’s theatre play. Students from Paihia School presented a reader’s theatre play at the 2006 New Zealand Reading Association conference in The Bay of Islands, so there is a history of interest in this genre at this school. As a follow-up to the Creative Coaching residency, Room 5 plans to storyboard their play and enter it into the NZ Transport Agency’s Create a Storyboard competition later on in the year.

For her class of year 7 and 8 students at Opua School, Margaret Lange as asked me to help her students write for the web about getting to school safely. Their plan is to offer non-fiction articles to the Feet First website, adding features such as click-ons, sub-headings, flow charts, breakouts, timelines, and labelled diagrams. As a follow up to the Creative Coaching residency, her class plans to use their thinking about how to get to school safely and actively to develop an illustrated picture book to enter into the Feet First Picture Book Award later this year.

Eveleen Pausma’s year 7 and 8 students at Russell School want to write non-fiction articles about journeys. To follow up the Creative Coaching residency, they plan to enter their articles into the School Journal’s Elsie Locke Writing Prize competition.

These are all innovative, creative, ambitous goals. I like the way each class has a clear, immediate focus for the Creative Coaching residency and then a plan for how to follow up the residency by entering a competition, building on writing skills that will hopefully be enhanced during the residency.

Last night, after I reached Russell, the Russell School principal, William Fuller, took me to two local beaches to collect mussels, cockles, and pipi, which we then had for dinner with his brother, Douglas, and two German visitors who were staying with Douglas. What a wonderful introduction to the Bay of Islands.

So this morning at Paihia, Adam took his class through a science-related writing exercise to give me a chance to see what his young writers are capable of. The ability range goes from students who struggle to get more than a single sentence written through to students who are quickly into their second page of writing. This very wide range of ability is going to be a challenge. We’ve agreed that composing a class-written play is the best way to go. A key competency in the curriculum is participating and contributing. Supporting everyone to participate and contribute (and relate to others) is going to be a focus.

We then took the children from a place they knew (reading School Journal plays, which can be acted, and which include some acting directions) to reader’s theatre plays, where everything has to be conveyed with your voice (that is, where there are no sets, costumes, or physical acting). Though the school has sets of reading theatre resources, Room 5 hasn’t started to use them this year yet in its reading programme.

Then we listened to Wellington writer Matt Comesky’s reader’s theatre play for children, The Forgotten Hero. Some of the questions afterwards were very insightful. Most of the children immediately got the idea that these plays aren’t acted and that you convey them to a listening audience with your voice. The children are now thinking about a “story” they could tell in a reader’s theatre play about travelling around school safely (to meet the key condition of the storyboard competition – that it be about travelling around school safely).

I’m staying at Tapeka Point, near Russell, so today day started on the car ferry going across from Oikato to Opua and then following the coast road to Paihia. Some Opua students caught the ferry with me, including a girl in Margaret’s class who is staying with her grandparents while her parents deal with the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake. (A boy in Adam’s class, I later found out, has lost his uncle in the earthquake.)

The students in Margaret’s class get to school in lots of different ways: by dinghy, by car ferry, by bike, by walking, by rural school bus, and more … and there are real challenges. Trucks and cars come down the hill past the school on their way to the car ferry, having only just left the open road. A protruding piece on a passing truck once caught the strap of a student walking on the outside edge of the footpath. Another truck’s brakes failed when it reached the bottom of the hill, sending a group of students scattering out of its path. And pedestrians on the car ferry have to get on and off safely using the same ramp as the cars and trucks. Some of the drivers aren’t even used to driving on the left side of the road. Lots of visitors pass through and foreign yachts often pass through customs here. So there’s plenty to think about.

The students, Margaret, and I explored differences between fiction, non-fiction, and “based on a true story” narrative and we looked at some of the features of writing for the web that make it really work, such as headings and sub-headings, photo captions, break outs, and click-ons ­– and why “here it is all in this screen” is such a powerful approach to writing for the web. The students are going to double-check how click-ons work on the Internet at home tonight. I’ve started to show them how to embed these for a web page editor. (Every student has access to the Internet at home and the back wall of the classroom is lined with computers.)

Don Long