The New Zealand Curriculum
The way our tamariki are taught and supported to learn, are important factors influencing children’s development and achievement at school.
The children are surrounded with engaging authentic learning that meet the students needs as well as national and local requirements.
The Key Competencies (managing self, relating to others, participating and contributing, thinking, understanding text and symbols) also form an integral part of our teaching and learning programmes.
Assessment practices at Rapaura School recognise that all children can make progress. In order to encourage and motivate, considerable emphasis is given to recognising the progress being made by each child.
Catering for a variety of learning styles, higher order thinking skills, information literacy and inquiry learning help us prepare our Rapaura students for life-long learning.
Click on the subject heading below to find out about our learning programmes
At Rapaura School we endeavour to engage our students with a balance of text-based activities and devices so the students become increasingly skilled and sophisticated speakers and listeners, writers and readers, presenters and viewers.
Our classroom programmes provide a wealth of literacy experiences whereby students support and reflect with each other, give opportunities where the children are presented with challenges to better their performance. Our literacy programme is a time where teachers and children learn strategies and skills of literacy and our inquiry time is where we apply the learnt information. This allows us to see the children applying their learning in a new concept.
Some of the learning experiences to support this are the Inquiry Learning Celebrations, assemblies, buddy time and sharing of learning with each other.
We run a phonics programme in the junior school to support the children’s learning. We offer a programme run by Learning Staircase called Steps, which support our literacy learners.
At Rapaura School we provide a range of meaningful contexts, where students engage in thinking and exploring mathematically. The students are taught number, place value, algebra, fractions, ratios, geometry, measurement and statistics.
These topics are taught to provide the students with effective means for investigating, interpreting, explaining and making sense of the world in which we live.
Activities to reinforce this are using symbols, graphs, and diagrams to communicate the learning.
We choose to teach the students of Rapaura School a curriculum that originates from the New Zealand Curriculum, through Inquiry.
Our Inquiry journey starts with a 5-week programme immersing and exciting our learners with many different activities linking to the topic.
The following 5 weeks learning is created from the children’s ‘wonderings’ (the questions and the learning they would like to pursue to enhance their knowledge and learning).
For example, one of our inquiry units was based on ‘History of Rapaura and the wider Marlborough community.’ The immersion involved whole school visits to Brayshaw Park, RSA, talking with elderly people of the community linked to the school, ex war veterans, neighbours of the school, Woodbourne Air Force personnel and more.
One class created a website http://rapaurawarheroes.weebly.com/. They used the war heroes to rename our classrooms after families who settled in the area. Another class created a movie of ‘Then and Now.’ Another group planned a menu of ‘Hangi flavoured roast lamb and vegetables’ that Back Country Cuisine kindly made and gifted the class 100 packets. This learning came about from the class researching how the soldiers of the wars preserved their food. There were books of the stories and learning from the children presented as well. The Coleman class, NE/Y1, invited RSA members to come for morning tea, baked them Anzac biscuits and presented them with a framed picture of poppies made by each child and a title, ‘We will remember you.’
Each Inquiry runs for approximately 10-weeks. At the end of the learning we come together to celebrate to our wider community.
The school plans up to three Inquiry topics per year based around a theme relevant to the community of Marlborough, globally or a curriculum area.
Te Reo is one of New Zealand’s official languages, and is an integral part of our day. At Rapaura School we have a school wide policy to introduce Te Reo dialogue every week, which is introduced and taught by Kuia Merehira who visits the school on a Thursday morning.
Each year we celebrate our success by participating in the local taiopenga. This is a time to celebrate the skill and leadership our tamariki display in this area.
