Autahi took some first steps back in time this week as we began our local history Inquiry. This inquiry will likely stretch over a long period of time as our local area is rich with pūrakau, legend and historical happenings. But, to begin with, we are focussing in on some learning about the place where our school now stands.
Inquiry is a style of learning that builds on a child's existing knowledge base by encouraging them to questions about a topic, pursuing knowledge through exploration and experimentation, review their findings and perhaps ask more questions. In other words, it's a never-ending cycle of discovery!
In Autahi, we aim to build our students' inquiry skills, such as how to ask questions, observe closely, gather and record new information. We try to be responsive to our students' interests as we go along. This means that we don't have a fixed roadmap of where we are going. But, at the same time, we aim to fuel the Inquiry by offering new information or experiences to help build knowledge or spark Curiosity.
This week, we tackled the concept of time. It's tricky to talk about things that happened in the past without some sense of how time passes: sometimes it can be hard to get a grip on what happened last week, let alone 800 years ago.
This is why we've been playing around with some timelines this week, starting close to home with a timeline of how people grow up. What order should we put the pictures in? What came first, next?
We built on this foundation by beginning to look at some images related to our history over the last thousand years or so. We included a recent photo of Autahi so that we could locate where we are now on the timeline.
As we tried to place them in order from oldest to newest, a rich conversation developed. It was exciting to hear our Autahi students thinking like historians and evaluating the evidence in front of them. Is it a photograph? Is it black and white and what might that mean? What about pictures that aren't photos? What are the people wearing and doing? What order should the different waka/boats/planes go in?
We still have plenty of questions about this and will need to return to our timeline We may move some of our pictures as we learn more...
