Putting Our Heads Together to Learn and Develop Ideas...

A big part of our focus in Room eight this year is on cooperative learning and taking responsibility for our own learning journeys.  To develop this we dedicate one afternoon a week to running our very own discovery learning time. This is where our tamariki get to engage in tasks of their choosing and work with their peers on activities that are set up to develop wider life skills. It is tremendous to see how well the class have adapted this learning style and the discussions that come out of their active learning is outstanding.

There are a number of benefits of bringing more discovery based learning approaches into our classroom program. Discovery learning supports an active engagement of the learner in the learning process (while you are participating you are paying more attention), it fosters curiosity, it enables the development of life long learning skills, it personalizes the learning experience, it is highly motivational as it allows individuals the opportunity to experiment and discover something for themselves, it builds on learner's prior knowledge and understanding, it provides the student with an opportunity to get early feedback on their understanding, it results in episodic memory, (a deeper type of memory that allows you to connect information to events which creates stimuli for remembering the information), and it develops a really effective class culture where our tamariki can see that they have direction and responsibility over their learning.

Here are some pictures of the time we have shared already: