Back to school

 

Grandparents' Day

Tikorangi School; the Principal is in the check shirt.

 

 

This morning we went to Grandparents' Day at Carys's school.



Carys (left front) in her classroom

Over a hundred of us crowded into the play area enclosed by the two classroom blocks and watched the half-hour Jump Jam session. The children sang and exercised wildly to several very rhythmic tracks, to get the blood flowing through their brains.

We had been welcomed with morning tea served by the Home and School Association members.

Dewey

Next we spent half an hour in Carys's classroom helping her with a spelling exercise, and looking at the dozens of interesting examples of language and art work the kids had done.

Then we bought lunch from the Home and School women, and finally visited the library, where they had a display of books for purchase for the library shelves.

What a great school environment! The principles behind the education being provided are similar to what my education was based on in the thirties, thanks to the contributions of great early 20th century educators like Dewey, Montessori and Tagore.

Montessori

Principles like:

          Kids' job is to play.

          Kids learn by doing, acting, trying, imitating, imagining, having a go, practising, repeating, and exploring.

          The teacher's job is to encourage, support, demonstrate, point, find the way, set the example.

We could not imagine a better environment for our granddaughter.



Tagore

This school is at Tikorangi, a farming village a few kms south of Carys's home. All around it are prosperous dairy farms.

The district also bustles with traffic for the oil and gas industry: a short distance north is the Motunui factory (methanol) and the same distance south is the similar, smaller Waitara Valley factory. All around are operating wells, or wells being drilled.

Tikorangi is a small sample of modern Taranaki.

 

(Tikorangi School was started in 1867, the year my grandfather, Fred, was born. Carys's Mum, Evelyn, spent some time there, as did her great-grandfather, Rex Barriball)