Culturally responsive pedagogies (pt 2)

Continuing with our cultural theme, we read other books as a class such as Selafina, and Tane steals the show, Papa's jandals and Saia and his turtle (among others). We focused for one week on each of these, dissecting them, getting fluent reading them and learning new words and about new cultures.

For guided reading, we also used stories that were based around the students cultures - Samoan, Tongan, New Zealand Maori, Niuean, etc. These can be seen in our planning here. For all of these stories, we used an audio-file as a follow up activity. This was so the students could hear the words being pronounced correctly, as well as reading them, so they got twice as much exposure to the other language.

These are some of the stories/poems we read
The Sons of Ma'afu story - Audio File
Kuri - Audio File
Poi story - Audio File
Awarua the Taniwha - Audio File
Mara (poem) - Audio File 
Te marama

In all of these, students were asked to make a personal connection to the story.  I remember one student, whilst reading the story Poi, told the group how she had made poi's with her aunty for Kapa Haka at her cousins school last year. What a rich connection! That student was then able to relate to the break-down of how to make the poi, the idea and experience of Kapa Haka and the family ties that associate with it.

We tried our best to record our discussions on our modelling books.

Finding meanings for new words in the story (This is from Kuri)

Recording questions we talked about from the story Poi.

Recording our predictions for the story Poi, based on the title and the picture on the first page.

Reading texts and discussing them in-depth provided rich conversation and allowed students to share their experiences in a safe and comfortable way.