Visitors

With the government first cutting professional development funding for a year and then restricting funding to literacy and numeracy and finally slashing millions of dollars worth of funding from kindergartens, including funding for provisionally registered teachers it's just lucky we still have our own networks of learning.

Teaching children literacy and numeracy material when they haven't worked through the necessary developmental milestones to make a strong foundation for it tends to be have poor results, and negative long term consequences like a leaky home or the results of other ill informed and poorly thought through policies.

Even when children have had the time taken to build a solid foundation big shifts underneath their learning can cause it to fall over just like an earthquake, the shakier the foundation the more likely this is to happen.

Known as transition drop, shifting to a new environment can be a big knock to a child's confidence and abilities, so we work hard to cushion the shift through transition visits, building links and relationships with the 18 local schools we feed too, keeping links with past children, and making links with new ones.

Recently Jo was invited to present on transition to a class of teachers and trainees at Massey on the work we've been doing here and the learning we did with Monica Cameron when transition development was still funded.

Appleton heard about this and asked to visit us, braving the skyrocketing petrol prices that have been hitting many rural families hard to spend an afternoon sharing ideas on transition and the many other areas currently off the funded list but necessary for quality education. We even shared some literacy and numeracy ideas as they are important pieces when included in the whole puzzle.

It was really lovely to see Hilary, Shona, Viv, Annette and Megan and as well as sharing our ideas and learning we picked their brains as thoroughly as we could in an afternoon as well.

A big thankyou to them for taking the time and expense to come all the way over from Dannevirke to see us.