Hayden's Writing

If I could choose ten things to add to the boring school playground, it would be these.

1. An anti-gravity chamber where you go inside and float slowly around.

2. A microscope magnified 5,000,000,000,000 where you can see tiny germs and interesting atoms.

3. A giant snakes and ladders board with humungous snakes and real, tall ladders.

4. A 20 meter long swimming pool with crystal clear invisible water.

5. A watermelon juice covered room for ginormous smashing watermelons.

6. A 50 meter long super mega hyper ultra complex maze of doom (with emergency exits just in case).

7. A giant trampoline park with 57 soft foamy pits and 73 bouncy trampolines of all shapes and sizes.

8. A candy land where every thing is made of delicious candy (completely unsupervised).

9. A colossal amazing roller coaster that does loop - dee - loops and twists dangerously at extremely high speeds.

10. A boring homework annihilating machine.

Learning Through Play

At Redwood School, we have a strong philosophy that play should be a large part of how children learn in their first two years at school. While maintaining our usual reading, writing and maths programmes, we start the day with Learning Through Play. The play is based on learning intentions in the Key Competencies and Curriculum areas.

Each room has two Focus Students as well as a Reporter and Photographer who record the learning of other students that is shared back to the class at Reflection Time.

The advantages are many but include a seamless transition from Early Childhood Education, improved oral language,  development of the Key Competencies in an authentic environment, allowing students to develop their sense of self, and enabling children to follow their passions.

Here is our Investigation Time in action: