Living Heritage - Tikanga Tuku Iho

Living Heritage -

Curriculum Links and Organisation

Background Curriculum Areas Other skills we built on Process

Background

The coast road stretches from Oamaru to Waianakarua via Kakanui. It is a road that many Kakanui children travel frequently but had little knowledge of some of the interesting places and features of the road. This topic was selected to help increase the children's knowledge of their local area as well as being an interesting and motivating topic to learn about. The whole school looked at this road with different classes following their wonderings to look at different aspects of the road.

Kakanui School has been part of the AVRACS I.C.T Cluster for three years and this website is the culmination of a terms work focusing on the living heritage of our area.

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Curriculum Areas

"Coasting the Coast" was a whole school inquiry based unit. I.C.T played a large part in the process and the outcomes (website)

While the whole school looked at the Coast Road, each class took a different approach and looked at things from different angles. The children's wonderings dictated the direction of their learning to a certain extent.

The main curriculum areas this topic encompassed were:

SOCIAL STUDIES:

This unit crossed many strands of the Social Studies curriculum:

  • Place and Environment
  • Culture and Heritage
  • Time Continuity and Change

and in some cases included Resources and Economic Activities.

SCIENCE

Some children's wonderings took them into looking at things from the Living World strand (animals and plant species along the coast road) and Planet Earth and Beyond strand (Geology of the coast road).

ENGLISH

Reading, writing and listening skills were fully integrated into this unit. The children wrote letters, e-mails and faxes to experts, read information in brochures, books and on internet sites and listened to experts talk about aspects of the coast road. Visual language played a part in the presentation of information via this website.

ICT

The children used a wide variety of ICT during this unit.

  • The children recorded images using digital and video camera on our bus trip
  • The children downloaded images off the internet using Google Images and other image sources.
  • The children used e-mailing and faxing to get information
  • The children used information sources such as the internet to get information.
  • The children looked at other web sites to gain ideas about interesting and effective layout.

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Other skills we built on

Other skills that we built on were:

  1. ICT Skills
  2. Questioning skills
  3. Communication Skills
  4. Research and information skills
  5. Presentation skills
  6. Cooperative skills

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Process

This unit was undertaken using an INQUIRY LEARNING process. Each class teacher led their own class through this process. Below is an outline of the process undertaken in the junior room.

  1. TUNING IN: Brainstorm and discussions about WHAT and WHERE the coast road is, the meaning of the word COAST, Who might use the road, why they might use the road, and an art activity about what vehicles use the coast road.
  2. FINDING OUT: The whole school went on a bus trip from one end of the coast road to the other. Teachers had previously arranged stop offs at various points and where possible people to tell us a little bit about each place. This gave the children a feel for and taste of each of the special places on the coast road. The children had digital cameras that were passed between them and recorded images of their trip.
  3. SORTING OUT: Back at school the children made a mural map of the coast road, drawing the places and sticking them on in the appropriate spot on the map (this mural features as the first page of the junior school web pages with hotspot hyperlinks to the pages). The children also sorted the digital images to show which location they came from. The children recorded what they had learnt so far about the different places and discussed which places we knew the most about and which we would like to know more about.
  4. GOING FURTHER: The children came up with questions they had been wondering about related to the coast road. These were recorded and then we grouped them with wonderings about the same place. We discussed how we could find information about these places. We decided to contact some people (using letters and e-mail) to see if they could help us answer our wonderings. From this we were able to visit members of the Collie Dog Club to see some dog trialling, had a visit from a member of the Oamaru Coastal Defence Restoration Group and went back to have a closer look inside Suisted Cottage with some of the people who had built it (who dressed in full period costume!). We also got several e-mails, faxes and letters back from people we contacted answering our questions.
  5. MAKING CONCLUSIONS: We recorded what we had learnt about each of the places we had wonderings about. We planned on paper what our website would look like (using a a big sheet of paper ruled up with a 3x3grid, sticking copies of the digital pictures where we wanted them to go etc - we had previously looked at website layout). The teacher inserted the pictures into a pre-arranged 3X3 grid in Front page and the children typed and organised the information.
  6. REFLECTING & TAKING ACTION: Our websites are to be put on the Living Heritage Website for all to see. We are going to notify the local visitors centre about this as we discovered there is very little information about the beautiful and interesting coast road available for tourists!

The middle and senior rooms went through a similar process with different age-appropriate activities. The children investigated their wonderings on a more individual basis and were able to create their own pages with little guidance.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Room 3 would like to thank:

  • Mr and Mrs Ferguson and Mr George Innes for showing us about dog trialling
  • Jeff Thompson for telling us about the Collie Dog Club.
  • Mr Caldwell for coming to school and telling us about the war bunker
  • Mr and Mrs McMillan for sending us information about the Millhouse.
  • Road Metals for e-mailing us about the Twin Rivers Quarry
  • Mrs Wing for e-mailing us about the Suisted Cottage.
  • Mrs Newbery and Mr Martin for dressing up and showing us inside Suisted Cottage.
  • The North Otago i-site and museum for information about the Kakanui Bridge.

Room 1 would like to thank:

  • Mr and Mrs McMillan for their information about the millhouse.
  • Mr Ryniker who helped us get information from the library for the Kakanui Wharf.
  • Mr Bell who helped with volcano information.
  • Mr Thomson and Mr Caldwell who helped us get information about the bunker.
  • Mrs Plieger for helping with research.

Room 2 would like to thank everyone that helped them with their web pages.

The staff at Kakanui school would like to thank our computer technician - Marie

Anne Bowman - and our ICT facilitator Deidre Senior.

We would like to thank North Otago Golf Club, North Otago Museum and David

Atkinson for the use of some photographs used on this website.

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