Students deliver free fruit to classrooms
Five days left in NZ… Hard to believe! Today we visited a school just outside of Wellington. Cannon’s Creek Primary School is categorized as decile 1, meaning the students are from the lowest economic sector. There are 180 students and 9 teachers. One of the teachers who is also the assistant principal, Hazel Havill, hosted us in the absence of the principal.
Because we are further south and the temperature is colder, all of the students were in their shoes. There was also a hint of security at the school in that we had to sign in at the front office. There was a dental clinic and a nurse is on campus twice a week. The school was very colorful! There were murals on the exterior walls and the interior walls of the front office were plastered in photos of the children. The population of this school is very different than Selwyn Primary School in Rotorua. Nearly all of the students are Pasifika, meaning they emigrated from a Pacific Island nation and do not speak English as a first language. There are no ESOL teachers, however, the classroom teachers have received training, and the teaching assistants speak some of the languages as well to help with new-comers. Unlike Selwyn where the heritage language is used in instruction, the Pasifika languages are mainly utilized in the dances and songs that are taught. They had a part-time reading recovery teacher, but she only really works with 1st grade students. There is no money to fund a position to assist with struggling readers at other levels.
The students were very excited to have visitors and they asked many questions. They were surprised to hear that students get lunch at school and they wanted to know if I’ve met President Obama. At the end of our visit, the children performed dances and songs from the Pacific Islands in an assembly. While the performers were on the stage, the other students in the audience joined in with singing and dancing. The students turned out to be more famous than we realized! As we were leaving we were given a cd containing many songs sung by the students they had put together in very professional packaging. In addition, they handed us a children’s book written about their community that mentions their school. A very nice surprise.
The rest of the day was spent with government officials. We toured Parliament, which is called the beehive because of the shape of the building, and met with various officials from the Ministry of Education. Another very full day. Tomorrow we are off to the South Island! Three hours on a ferry crossing the Cook Strait – wish me luck!
