Posts by Gwen Bowler

8 min Read

Support Staff at School

Support Staff are the backbone of any school. From caretaker Jeni, to office duo Val and Rhonda and Teacher Aides, Cindy, Penny, Diana and Karen, we t…
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…

Ready to enrol now? It's risk free