L1 Kōrero Assessments

Level 1 and level 3 students preparing for their kōrero (conversations) was such fun. Level 1 students trying to do the master chef thing making a jam sandwhich trying hard not to laugh (katakata).

Yr 10's learning simple sentence structures

Students learnt a new structure using kei te... by changing the verb and noun.  Example: kei te kai te kuri (the dog is eating) students were able to change the verb kei te moe te kuri change the noun to a pronoun kei te moe ia (he or she is sleeping). Continue using the structure but changing it up to increase the vocabulary knowledge of the student. Te extend the activity i posted random pictures on the screen and asked students to write sentences using kei te to describe the picture. No words just pictures.

Justifying student's grades

 How do you justify a students grade in Te Reo Māori. The marking schedule and sample moderation through an external provider or other school  is generally a good source to justify if your marking is up to scratch.

Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori begins

Introduction to our kaupapa today. Focused on four kupu, Paetae (achieved), Kaiaka (Merit), Kairangi (Excellence) and Aromatawai (Assessment). Short and to the point. Relevant to support teachers in their cultural response to students sitting exams today.  Adding in a little waiata too...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YMv5BJZ9EA

The effectiveness of a digital blue print

Our department website https://sites.google.com/a/tamaki.ac.nz/te-reo-maori/

A landing pad for students to find the core foundations for our department, who we are and what our core values.  A living document.

Te Wiki o Te Reo Māori 11- 17 September 2017

Kia ora Te Reo Māori
 http://www.tetaurawhiri.govt.nz/kaupapa-whakatairanga/maori-language-week-mi-nz/

Celebrating Te Reo Māori in schools: what do schools do to celebrate Te Reo Māori, leave a comment.

Kohanga Reo a great starter for learning Māori

Tamariki are impressionable at this age Kohanga Reo the language nest is instrumental in fostering our language, tautoko. https://www.kohanga.ac.nz/

Evidence of accelerated learning

Gleitman says the biggest clue to the accelerated learning is the fact that it occurs when the child starts making sentences. "When the child begins talking at two words at a time, this is the first evidence that they understand something about grammar and language," she says.

https://whyfiles.org/058language/baby_talk2.html

I realised this early in my own teaching practice that as students began to add simple basic communicative language structures together and did this on a regular basis that not only did they start building their vocabulary but they were also able to express and communicate their requests in simple accurate forms of conventional language modes of whakarongo (listening) , kōrero (speaking) and tuhituhi (writing).   

Waiata Melody called prosody

Jucszyk thinks babies distinguish clauses by learning the melody of a language -- the rhythm of sounds and pauses, the varying pitch in the voice, the different pattern of loudness and softness. (Melody, called "prosody" in the linguistic trade, also helps infants distinguish one language from another. At six months, babies will listen just as long to a foreign language as to their own, but at nine months, they prefer their native tongue.)

So how do they actually learn to talk?

https://whyfiles.org/058language/baby_talk.html

Baby Talk

An interesting article about babies learning to talk: by using the pattern of sounds within words to distinguish the ends of words. Babies "pay attention to sounds that cohere within words, compared to the less predictive sounds that change as they span a word boundary," Aslin says. And when that pattern breaks, the baby understands that a new word is about to start.

https://whyfiles.org/058language/baby_talk.html

Blogging

Students are writing in their blogs.

Rāuemi

Preparing students for exams

We spent the week going over writing techniques in Te Reo Māori to help students prepare for Monday's L3 Internal exam. They will sit a Pānui and Tuhituhi exam. Kia kaha.