Academic
The curriculum is constantly evolving to ensure that we will help students learn in a way that will prepare them for tomorrow’s world. It is designed to provide students with a strong foundation for learning through programmes that are engaging and authentic, allowing learners to achieve academic excellence and a lifelong love of learning.
Every learner will be provided with a range of opportunities, within and beyond the classroom, to enrich and extend their learning. Teachers provide a differentiated approach and personalise programmes to meet the specific need of students. In addition students also experience challenge through the variety of specialist subject areas, such as Technology, Materials and the Arts.
Art
Sir Edmund Hillary Middle School students are taught a wide range of visual skills; with a sound base of compositional theory and tonal modelling, while gaining confidence in using a variety of media; sometimes mixing media and informing their own art-work through the investigation of ‘artist models’.
Music
Music offers a wide variety of academic and practical skills across year 7 and 8. In class, students at the middle school level are able to gain experience in Writing and Reading Notes, Production Methods, Guitar, Keyboard, Drums, Band or I-Music.
English at Sir Edmund Hillary Middle School encompasses the teaching and learning of; oral, written, and visual forms of the language.
Reading and writing are integrated with connective links to all curriculum areas.
Programmes will:
- Reflect the culture and needs of the children.
- Allow for learning and teaching of the key competencies.
- Be purposeful and meaningful to enable all students to experience success in literacy.
- Be adaptive and relevant.
- Provide ongoing assessment practices to enhance learning for the students.
- Reflect current and effective literacy practice.
Knowledge, skills and experience can be gained as students:
- Engage with, and enjoy language in all its varieties.
- Learn to understand, respond to, and use oral, written and visual language effectively in a range of contexts.
- Learn collaboratively and co-operatively.
- Listen to and accept the responses of others, and respond to them in an appropriate manner.
- Learn independently, and make appropriate choices from independent activities available.
- Take leadership roles in the classroom as appropriate.
- Access appropriate literacy resources as required.
- Set personal English learning goals and plan a learning pathway.
- Confidently explain what they are learning.
- Discuss their learning and share their knowledge with others.
- Reflect on their learning and consider next steps.
- Participate in self and peer assessment.
Health and Physical Education
In Health and Physical Education, the focus is on the well-being of the students themselves, of other people, and of society through learning in health-related and movement contexts. This healthy lifestyle understanding is developed in an integrated fashion through our Skills for adolescence programme, ‘Making Connections’ themes, Hauora Values, Fantastic Four Student Research and Outside Facilitators .
The Middle School years are a time of significant growth and change for adolescents. To help them understand the changes they are undergoing, we deliver the ‘Village Collective’ programme at both year levels within the safe environment provided by the classroom and the home room teacher. We hold parent meetings to share the resources we will be using in this programme, develop partnerships with parents to address any concerns and take on board any feedback from our whanau around the area through feedback forms, surveys and Health Consultation Feedback meetings.
The Health curriculum is further developed through Food Technology, Hospitality, the Sports Faculty and sports training regimes which address healthy nutrition, fitness, mental well-being and the pursuit of exercise routines into adulthood.
At Sir Edmund Hillary Middle School you have the opportunity to learn and understand about the fundamentals and skills of a variety of physical activities. Our staff are experienced in Physical Education. In our Junior Program pupils experience a variety of activities and a variety of facilities.
Junior Physical Education Philosophy:
- Students will develop their critical thinking and interpersonal skills through active participation in a range of physical contexts.
- Students will develop their motor skills and an understanding of physical activities through active participation.
Future Focus
Within our school curriculum we think it is important to embed our learning with a multitude of different Languages.
Our community has a high proportion of Samoan, Tongan, Cook Island, Fijian, and other pacific island ethnicity’s. We have cultural weeks and we relate our teaching and learning experiences around the languages. These students are mostly fortunate enough to have kept their language because it has not been lost from generation to generation while also communicating in their own language at community events, church, or just at home.
Our Māori on the other hand unfortunately often cannot speak the language because it has basically been lost with in their own whanau generations. We aim to cross this barrier with a focus on Māori Language.
Our focus is to get all our students to Level 3 of Te Reo: Developing communication skills in te reo Māori Level 3 Te Reo Link.
Te Reo Māori
Ko te reo te manawa pou o te Māori,
Ko te ihi te waimanawa o te tangata,
Ko te roimata, ko te hūpē te waiaroha.
Ko tōku nui, tōku wehi, tōku whakatiketike, tōku reo.
Te reo Māori is indigenous to Aotearoa New Zealand. It is a taonga recognised under the Treaty of Waitangi, a primary source of our nation’s self-knowledge and identity, and an official language. By understanding and using te reo Māori, New Zealanders become more aware of the role played by the indigenous language and culture in defining and asserting our point of difference in the wider world.
Ko te reo Māori te kākahu o te whakaaro,
te huarahi i te ao tūroa.
By learning te reo and becoming increasingly familiar with tikanga, Māori students strengthen their identities, while non-Māori journey towards shared cultural understandings. All who learn te reo Māori help to secure its future as a living, dynamic, and rich language. As they learn, they come to appreciate that diversity is a key to unity.
Te reo Māori underpins Māori cultural development and supports Māori social and economic development in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. Understanding te reo Māori stretches learners cognitively, enabling them to think in different ways and preparing them for leadership.
By learning te reo Māori, students are able to:
- participate with understanding and confidence in situations where te reo and tikanga Māori predominate and to integrate language and cultural understandings into their lives
- strengthen Aotearoa New Zealand’s identity in the world
- broaden their entrepreneurial and employment options to include work in an ever-increasing range of social, legal, educational, business, and professional settings.
Ko te manu e kai ana i te miro, nōna te ngahere.
Ko te manu e kai ana i te mātauranga, nōna te ao.
Ko te reo te mauri o te mana Māori.
What is Leaning Language About?
Learning a new language provides a means of communicating with people from another culture and exploring one’s own personal world.
Languages are inseparably linked to the social and cultural contexts in which they are used. Languages and cultures play a key role in developing our personal, group, national, and human identities. Every language has its own ways of expressing meanings; each has intrinsic value and special significance for its users.
Why Study a Language?
Languages link people locally and globally. They are spoken in the community, used internationally, and play a role in shaping the world. Oral, written, and visual forms of language link us to the past and give us access to new and different streams of thought and to beliefs and cultural practices.
Te reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) are official languages of New Zealand. Because of New Zealand’s close relationships with the peoples of the Pacific, Pasifika languages also have a special place.
By learning an additional language and its related culture(s), students come to appreciate that languages and cultures are systems that are organised and used in particular ways to achieve meaning. Learning a new language extends students’ linguistic and cultural understanding and their ability to interact appropriately with other speakers. Interaction in a new language, whether face to face or technologically facilitated, introduces them to new ways of thinking about, questioning, and interpreting the world and their place in it. Through such interaction, students acquire knowledge, skills, and attitudes that equip them for living in a world of diverse peoples, languages, and cultures. As they move between, and respond to, different languages and different cultural practices, they are challenged to consider their own identities and assumptions.
As they learn a language, students develop their understanding of the power of language. They discover new ways of learning, new ways of knowing, and more about their own capabilities. Learning a language provides students with the cognitive tools and strategies to learn further languages and to increase their understanding of their own language(s) and culture(s).
At Sir Edmund Hillary Middle School we implement the Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities (DMIC) Approach towards our Mathematics Curriculum.
Please see the description below of the programme accompanied by a (DMIC) video explaining the Approach:
Introduction
‘Doing maths’ is looking a little different these days in some classrooms, as more collaborative approaches to solving mathematics problems are being encouraged.
In some South Auckland schools in particular, this development of “communities of mathematical inquiry” is being led by Dr. Bobbie Hunter, a researcher, academic and New Zealand-born Cook Islander, whose focus is on better meeting the needs of all students and of Pasifika learners in particular.
The roles and responsibilities of teachers and students are changing as the patterns of communication and participation have students taking more responsibility for active listening and sense making. In a lesson, the solutions to problems are discussed, negotiated and constructed in a collective way. Learning conversations include all students, and everyone feels that their contribution is valued. Students feel that everyone succeeds when the group succeeds.
This video briefly explores the components of such a lesson. We’ll look at the mathematics problems themselves, the way in which these are ‘launched’ in the lesson before groups work together on constructing solutions, we’ll see the collective sharing of these, and the way in which the teacher connects group learning to important big mathematical ideas. Finally we’ll identify the underlying communication and participation dynamics that are essential to a successful lesson.
The problem
The problem itself is carefully chosen and crafted.
When I write a number problem, for example, my starting place is just what’s happening in my room and in the world of my students. I think hard about the numbers I want the students to work with, and I ensure that the solution can be reached using a number of different strategies or approaches. They’ve got to be able to ‘come at’ the problem in a number of ways.
The problems I write for the kids must be both achievable and sufficiently challenging. But I need to be really clear myself about the big idea I want to connect to. So knowing the number property that I want my kids to learn about is a useful starting place. Generalising is such an important part of mathematics learning.
As I create a problem, I’ve got to really know my students and know my maths! I know which strategies I want them to explore, but I also need to have anticipated, ahead of time, all the possible approaches the students might take. I also need to recognise the possible errors they might make along the way so I can use these to unpack the students’ thinking, and to take them forward.
We have heard how a problem should:
- be culturally appropriate;
- be related to a current experience or a context that is familiar;
- challenge the students’ thinking;
- have multiple entry and exit points;
- be one in which a number of approaches or strategies can be used;
- lead to the big idea and generalisation;
- be fully explored by the teacher before the lesson, so that all outcomes and possible errors are anticipated.
The learning environment
The kind of mathematics problems teachers give their students is really important. So are the cooperative and collaborative learning behaviours in the classroom!
For everyone to be able to contribute their maths ideas to a collective solution, and feel that their input is valued, teachers themselves must rethink their role and reconsider the ‘power base’ in their classroom.
Classroom behaviours and cues, attitudes and beliefs about what is important, and the implicit and explicit rules that govern the interactions in a lesson, need to be talked about openly. Changing classroom norms, and the way people communicate and participate, take very careful scaffolding. And it takes time!
Launching the problem
In order for each student to actively contribute to an agreed group solution for a given problem, all students need to understand what is being asked of them. They need to be given time to get to know and interpret the question.
Giving class time to understanding the problem may involve the teacher in making time to wait for a student to clarify their thinking before they contribute their idea, echoing an interpretation to check for meaning, or asking a student to repeat what another student has said.
Group Work and Teacher Role
Groups are comprised of students of a range of abilities. The onus on any student in the group is to ensure that all other group members understand the idea they have shared, and also to ask questions if they do not fully understand the idea of another student. All students must take responsibility for reasoned sense-making.
As the teacher roves between groups, their focus is on the group process and dynamics. The teacher’s role is to prompt individual and group responsibility for collective understanding of, and negotiated agreement on a problem solution. It is not their role to simply give clues to find the right answer.
The teacher may prompt the group to consider how they will support one of their members to present their agreed strategy and solution to the whole class. The group must be also prepared to answer questions and respond to challenges from class members, and explain their mathematical reasoning.
The teacher is also actively seeking the group whose strategies and solutions will, when shared, most effectively lead to new learning for the whole class. It takes astute noticing, and sound mathematical knowledge of a well-constructed problem, for the roving teacher to identify the group, or groups, whose solutions will best connect with the important big mathematical idea.
Plenary (Sharing)
It takes skillful orchestration on the part of the teacher to ‘conduct’ the sharing session in which representations, explanations, reasoning and justification play a key part.
As students explore and explain differences and similarities in approaches and representations, they revise and extend their thinking. The questioning and argumentation that the teacher encourages, further deepens the understanding of all students.
Making Connections
When the problem was being written, the important mathematical idea that this problem would lead to was clearly identified by the teacher. The nub of the lesson is at this point, when the teacher makes this connection explicit for the students, and the important generalization is made.
Participation and Communication at Work
Throughout the lesson a finely tuned synthesis of participation and communication structures are at work to create a fully inclusive community of mathematics ‘inquirers’.
I’ve had to work really hard on developing active listening with my kids and having them understand how important it is to ask questions if they don’t understand. My message to the kids is really about actively taking responsibility for their own learning, and for their classmates’ learning too.
It’s taken time for my students to get the whole idea of supporting each other so that everyone understands and shares in the success of the group. It’s a big shift to have them thinking about clearly communicating an idea so that everyone gets it.
I’ve worked hard to have the children understand and feel comfortable using mathematical language and terms. I’ve also had to work hard to clearly understand number properties myself so that I can write problems well, and then make the connection for the children.
I’m really pleased that my kids are now learning to take a risk and will disagree or challenge someone if they’re thinking differently. They’ve had to feel safe, and that takes time. We’re now just starting to get some really good conversations about the mathematics in a problem, and it’s really exciting.
Conclusion
In a classroom in which mathematical inquiry and learning is the responsibility of everyone in the class community, the teacher will often be heard to say to their students, “Remember, for a group to be successful, you all need to be asking a lot of questions”.
In fact this deceptively simple reminder, may disguise the complexity of the factors that the teacher has skillfully blended to create the safe, inclusive environment in which all the students can actively contribute to the collective success of mathematics.
At Sir Edmund Hillary Middle School we:
- Provide effective classroom based Numeracy programmes
- Cater to a range of abilities by grouping appropriately
- Offer extension opportunities in the Academic Academy
- Provide support to students with identified learning needs
- Use up-to-date technology and equipment to engage students
- Run a School Mathletics competition
Science at Sir Edmund Hillary Middle School:
- Classroom programmes focus on delivering experiences which explore the concept of using science to explain our rapidly changing world.
- Science at Sir Edmund Hillary Middle School uses the scientific process to actively promote and model thinking skills.
- A strong emphasis on questioning, hypothesising and reaching conclusions through engaging and hands on student centred learning.
- Science is integrated, as much as possible, across other subject areas to assist students in becoming critical, informed and responsible citizens in a society which is dealing with vast challenges and developments daily.
Science is also part of the Technology Cycle so students are immersed in a specifically designed Science programme. Students will be exposed to be a variety of hands-on learning experiences designed to extend students’ knowledge and skills.
The Social Sciences learning area is about how people participate in society and how society operates. It has significance for people in their everyday interactions as citizens and members of communities in New Zealand and the world.
Through the Social Sciences, students engage critically with issues in society. They gain skills, knowledge and experience that help them to understand, participate in, and contribute to the communities in which they live and work.
At Sir Edmund Hillary Middle School the expected outcomes of the Social Sciences programmes focuses on the development of the action learning approach and questioning skills in authentic learning situations. We are continuing to develop a whole school approach to integrate learning in a cohesive manner.
Through Social Sciences we aim to:
- Build on the Action Learning process through guided inquiry into broader issues relating back to how we can make a difference to the world we live in.
- Develop student abilities to undertake an in-depth inquiry.
Soft and Hard Materials
Completed over a two year cycle as an elective
Food
Food is covered within the NZ Curriculum delivered by classroom teachers throughout the year.
Sound
In this advanced technological era students investigate production techniques in sounds using apps such as Garageband, Tenuto, and Magic Piano.
Media
- Media communicates ideas and information through conceptual design. In today’s society, communication and design are vital factors and visual literacy is an important part of the cognitive process.
- Media enables students to apply creativity, logic and knowledge to solving real life problems. Students are encouraged to seek innovative solutions and use design to develop and communicate these solutions in various ways. The use of computer aided design and movie production is has a predominant place in the course. Media involves an interesting variety of learning experiences that teaches students to become leaders in the ever changing world of technology and therefore media.
Don’t just take our word for it?
Here is what our last ERO report had to say (24/6/15)
Reporting on your child’s progress
The following information will help you know how your child is doing at school:
- Student Led Conferences (term one)
- Parent Interviews (term two)
- Written Reports (terms two and four)
Assessment
Throughout the year students participate in a range of cognitive and non-cognitive assessment tasks which are used to inform teaching and learning programmes. Students are encouraged to lead their own learning, and work with the teacher to interpret their assessment data in order to identify next learning steps.
We use an extensive range of standardised assessment tools such as e-asTTle and PAT to determine progress and achievement. This information is reported regularly to parents and caregivers through student led conferences and twice yearly written reports against the National Standards.
Useful Links
Here is some information Parents may find useful (Just click on the links below)
Ministry of Education information on National Standards
http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/National-Standards/Supporting-parents-and-whanau
Ministry of Education information about how National Standards link to NZ Curriculum levels
http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/National-Standards
Information on PAT and STAR tests
http://www.nzcer.org.nz/tests/assessment-services-schools
Information on e-asTTle testing
http://e-asttle.tki.org.nz/