Writing our own Māui Legends

 A wet week is a great time to explore an interest in detail.  We've been having a lot of discussions about the notion of Māui ( who we know well here at Northland Kindergarten) and how he can be seen  in a movie lots of friends have enjoyed ( Moana). We've been noticing that the tattoos on the Māui in the movie shows pictures of  Māui stories we know  in action ( and a few stories we don't as yet). We've been in a flurry of drawing and writing and re reading the legends, researching and book making as we revisit the legends, Some of us are sharing our work at mat time!

Drawing Māui's exploits....

Māui here at Kindergarten and further afield...

Tell me a story!

What a lot of ways we are finding to create or retell  a story! Lets keep on finding more ways and a wider range of knowledge to draw from as we practice the idea of taking charge of the story.....
Here's a digital version of most of our wall display in the kindergarten  about our storying work..

Indigo's storying

We are great at creating stories based on visual prompts... as well as making them up ourselves. The team generated prompts in our every day programme are showing as we work in every day learning.......

Maddy the Author and Illustrator

Well done to Maddy... making a book and being brave enough to share it at our mat time hui. You might have noticed that lots of friends are very keen to explore the notion of the mechanics and content of books... we've had lots of fun with the character and plots!

Finding lots of ways to document our thoughts......

Huge thanks to Seren for sharing her book with our blogging community. We love the book she made building on her keen interest in stories, and also drawing spirals or koru. Here, after drawing the images and dictating the text to the kaiako scribe,  she gives us a voice over so all her friends who can't yet read can enjoy her story too. Tumeke! Ka pai tō mahi!

Sharing learning experiences between Kindergarten and Home.

Thanks to Zac's family for sharing his interests and  experiences- enabling us to get on board and use them in our planned programme for him. Here's his learning story and a digital voiced version of his story about his holiday that enables him to assess his own work and plan new adventures....

Literacy at Northland Kindergarten

One question families often ask us is how literacy learning is deliberately planned for - for each and every child in an everyday kindergarten setting. The answer to this is we weave it throughout the learning environment so we are challenging them to use it while having fun, and use it for purposes important to them. We use their interests to add literacy challenge to their investigations and support them to feel successful and satisfied as they use the tools of communication. Here is a clip ( thanks James' family for letting us use it yet again) that we have been asked for to look at this topic... it's on the association website an was used for the Festival of Education sponsored by the Ministry earlier. It's aimed at teachers, so sorry for lots of words... but you'll get the idea of how we take a talent and keep on throwing new opportunities for it to develop in a lot of different curriculum areas......