Over the year I have been re thinking the way I have been teaching Te
Reo in my classroom. Usually it is a 30 -minute lesson once a week. I began to
find this wasn't working for my class in the the fact it was only a one off
lesson and by the time we re-visited the following week a lot of the students
had forgotten their Reo.
I decided to do a 15 minutes lesson every day and started incorporating
activities into their language programme to help consolidate previous and new
learning. So after our Karakia each day we started to do mini lessons based on
the topic we were looking at that term.
My emphasis was to make sure that my class were pronouncing the words
correctly and had time to consolidate this. This is where I felt a one off
lesson a week wasn't helping with this. My students needed time each day to
work on their pronunciation and to listen to themselves and others speaking.
When we learnt about Te Tinana (the body), I
had already establish that the majority of my class knew their basic
body parts thanks to 'Head, shoulders, knees and toes' song in Te Reo therefore
I decided to extend them by teaching them the rest of their body parts. Once we
had spent time learning how to pronounce each body
part correctly, we moved on to asking simple commands to help identify
them.
Kei hea? (Where is your) Anei
taku (here is)
We also played a matching game in groups/pairs (as shown in the picture
below)
 |
| Twinkl |
During their language time, students were able to work in pairs/small
groups to either play the matching game or ask Kei hea?
We also did this when we learnt about about Akomanga (my classroom). I
used a lot of the ideas from this site. Parts of our classroom were already
labelled in Te Reo so my class were able to identify a few items already. We
used the command
'He aha tēnei? - What is
this?'
Children used the cards to help consolidate their learning.
After each term, students still continued to use these cards and pictures during their language and free time.
I saw a vast improvement in their learning and saw the benefits of doing mini lessons each day rather than a one off lesson each week.
