Jacob Walker Professional Blog

Yesterday Wesley Intermediate had an exciting opportunity to be part of the "Just be" expo held at the local community centre. It was a great day, and an awesome opportunity for our Year 8's to get to know some older students from the local colleges. The day was designed around looking at future careers and involved the likes of the police, fire service, and other people or companies working in the area. I was lucky enough to end up running some workshops from Rui at Critical, who is an architect and problem solver who looks at the needs of the community around him and develops products and ideas alongside businesses to help create sustainable ideas, services and products. It was great fun having 15 minutes to teach the idea of design and development to some students who may have otherwise never imagined they had the potential to be creative. I do hope some sparks were lit from this experience. Yet in the end, what I came to realise is that within the community I...

So again I have been developing some sites to use within class that create equity, inclusiveness and shared understanding of learning. I have been mainly focusing on my reading tasks of late, but had a sudden burst of inspiration to look at writing. Using the new google sites I started with a one page work site, aimed at descriptive writing. However as the week went on I decided that I should try and finish it off with more of the writing styles that we cover in school.  And so this site was born. I have not tried it yet within class due to testing taking place, but will be giving it a good go in the next two weeks. The tasks were all sourced from Wesley intermediate staff or created by me, and still have a way to go to become a bit more defined, but at the moment I am looking at sharing this with the community to see what ideas can come to help the development. check the link for my site below Writing site

The leaders and I had a great meeting today about how our modules we are working on to increase Whanau engagement within the Ako Hiko cluster of schools. Wesley Primary had trialled the first Module and had tinkered with it to suit their needs. I talked to Phil from Wesley primary about setting up a joint Module night so we could capture the same family's in one go, as we share a lot of the same students. We also talked a bit more about setting up a talent show of some sort, which gained interest from some of the other schools. It is now worth looking at a way to get this running as an Ako Hiko event rather than just a Wesley event. Another great takeaway from this meeting was looking at the future of Ako Hiko for next year. Starting next year Core will be taking a backseat and that means Ako Hiko will be all on its own for the first time. New territory! The main things we talked about around this, were, how do we make sure we keep moving forward with the same goals, and make th...