Meeting with Felicity from Waltham
5/12/17
Felicity is the CoL leader for Transition to School. She has a background in Special Education, having specialised in this area during her years of study. She currently teaches New Entrants at Waltham School.
Her focus for the CoL is: 'What is a good transition?'
She would like to establish relationships between the CoL schools and 'open the pathways of communication'. She believes there are good collaborative relationships within schools, but would like these relationships to be broadened to exist between schools. The current schools in our CoL are: St Martins, Opawa, Beckenham, Waltham, St Marks, Diamond Harbour, Cashmere High + 24 ECEs.
We discussed that a challenging transition in a Decile 3 school would quite likely look quite different to one in a Decile 8 or 10 school.
Felicity is going to send out a survey next year to find out more about transition in general in each of the CoL schools.
She asked us about transition at Beckenham School and we described the transition programme to her.
We asked about collaborative teaching practice at Waltham, and she described Waltham’s ‘nest’. This involved having one teacher working with the very small number of children in this group and the other NE teacher and a TA working with the remaining NEs. The ‘nurture’ group had a focus on play-based learning, routines, oral language, 1-1 reading… the two teachers took turns with each of the two groups and changed roles fortnightly.
We discussed what is working as far as collaboration goes at the NE level at each school?
Felicity described Waltham’s use of the Seesaw interactive Blog, whereby children post their own work and parents are able to comment. Felicity is using this at Waltham, however the children at the moment are just learning to use the tool, so no work has actually been published yet.
At Waltham they start the year with low numbers (15 ch’n, 2 teachers and a TA), rising in numbers to 30 children, 2 teachers and a TA.
Rowe described the Mutukaroa programme, its benefits (e.g., strengthened relationships with families and the provision of resources targeted to each child’s specific learning goals), and we mentioned our school website link which allows parents access to resources which they can make themselves.
Felicity asked if she could come along to our December 13th parent information meeting about Transition to School.
We look forward to working with Felicity throughout 2018!
Our meeting ended at 4 p.m.
