Posts by Gwen Bowler
7 min Read
Telling Stories Through Art
Static images of sea creatures with tangled fishing nets around their fins started Room 12 students thinking about how they could create multimedia ar…
< 1min Read
Out and About Around the School
A trip to the gully, the maze, and the aquaponics unit have helped Room 12 unpack what an ecosystem is and to use these experiences to write informati…
5 min Read
25 Years and Counting
There are not many things at Wairakei Primary School that Diana Fitzsimmons doesn’t know about. As she heads towards her 25 year celebration, I sat do…
3 min Read
Learn by Doing
The objective was to use the Stop Motion App to create a short movie retelling a local Maori narrative. Stop Motion is a free app that makes short an…
3 min Read
Targeted Support Where it Counts
It’s a team effort at Wairakei Primary to provide various learning programmes that support our learners to be their best.
3 min Read
Inquiry more than a buzz word
A student said to me recently, what is inquiry? It got me thinking, have I been explicitly teaching inquiry, or is it just a ‘word’ teachers and educa…
7 min Read
Power for Learning Journey
Wairakei Primary started their Power For Learning (PB4L) journey several years ago with 2022 seeing a rebranding and introduction of the Tokarewa prog…
6 min Read
Literacy all around us
Cast your mind back to when you were five or six and see if you can pinpoint when you learnt to read and write. I can’t. It happened over time. This i…
6 min Read
What is a SENCO?
Supporting the pastoral, social and academic needs of students with identified special education needs is a team effort. SENCO co-ordinates all the st…
4 min Read
Hands-on Experiences Develop Writing Skills
Playing on the playground, visiting the maze, painting self-portraits, noticing spring or blowing bubbles are just a few of the ‘recreative’ writing m…
