Permaculture Design Course

I have just completed a Permaculture Design Course at the Food Forest in Gawler with Graham and Annemarie Brookman and guest lecturer – world renowned Permaculture Specialist David Holmgrem (pictured) .  The course was 10 days of intensive face to face sessions combined with 4 weeks of additional personal study days.

It was such a wonderful experience (exhausting but wonderful), we were immersed in the philosophies of Permaculture Design and given the opportunity to visit a number of sites around Adelaide and Stirling who are practising these philosophies on a daily basis in a range of ways.  Being surrounded by like minded people during the course was truly inspirational.

I presented a successful project presentation during the course and was lucky enough to have 4 other students choose to join my team and develop a Permaculture Design for my school.  My team was wonderfully diverse with members bringing a range of skills to the team such as plant knowledge, energy efficiency expertise and IT skills. 

My team presenting our project and with our model and site map.

We developed a plan consisting of 5 stages that our school can implement over time as funds and hands on assistance become available.  We felt it was vital to include the students at the school in the design process.  I worked with them to measure the spaces and to do the ph testing of the soil on the site.  Students were also involved in gathering items for the model made for the project and subsequently made a range of models of the site themselves.

I look forward to implementing the design into the school with the support of my team and students and thank my team for their time and expertise with this project.

 Graham and Annemarie Brookman and I after receiving my certificate and the 2013 Permaculture Design Certificate group.

Dyslexia Aware Schools

Wow I cant beleive how quickly this year is traveling, I am a little behind with my blogging as I have been so busy with my studying but will do my best to rectify that now...

With the Kitchen Garden program now up and running at our school I have changed my focus to implementing a ‘Dyslexia Aware School’ accreditation process throughout the Barossa and Gawler Regions with the hope that once the process is in place those of us involved will be able to support schools Australia wide to become accredited and make the changes needed both at a classroom level and leadership level to improve the learning outcomes of the thousands of students in Australia who have been diagnosed with Dyslexia or who have Dyslexic type learning needs. 

I was thrilled to spend time with world renowned Dyslexia specialist Neil Mackay (pictured below)during his recent visit and am truly excited to have been invited to work with him on writing and implementing the accreditation process for schools in Australia.  Staff at my school are committed to having this process completed by the end of the year and are looking forward to having Neil spend time at our school when he returns to Australia later this year to work through the audit and accreditation process with us.  We will be working in partnership with the Dyslexia Action Group of Barossa and Gawler Surrounds (DAGBAGS) to ensure the accreditation process is successfully implemented in as many schools as possible.  The group is also looking into creating and supplying a range of resources that can be used by schools as they adopt some of the methods/processes proven to improve the learning outcomes of these students.

June already!!

Well it is June already and as I write this I am finding myself wondering where the first half of the year has gone!! I am also very excited that June has arrived as later this month I will be taking three of my colleagues from Naracoorte South Primary School to the 'Happiness and its Causes' conference in Melbourne where we will hear 'His Holiness the Dalai Lama' himself speak.

I am also looking forward to hearing many of the other great speakers who I'm sure will enlighten us with many words of wisdom to help us get the most from our lives.  At this time of year when reports are looming, the sky is dreary and the wind is freezing, I am definitely in need of some positive energy!  If you would also like some daily inspiration you can like 'happiness and its causes' on Facebook for links to many inspiring blogs and quotes to lift your mood.

Last month I was able to use the first of my award money to take my whole current school staff (of four teachers) from Frances Primary School to the Hawker Brownlow 10th Thinking and Learning conference in Melbourne.

This was an amazing opportunity where we could all learn together and return back to school all with the same understandings, ready to put our learning into action in the classroom.  

We attended Jay McTighe's 'Understanding by Design' sessions for two of the three days and on the third day attended Phil Warrick's 'The Highly Engaged Classroom' and William Ferriter's session on 'Writing Student Centred Learning Targets.'  I would highly recommend you to seek out works by these professionals.  They provided us with many practical ideas but also challenged our thinking on our classroom practice and our understanding of the Australian Curriculum.  

Here is a photo of us with Jay McTighe. (I'm the one on Jay's right.)  His books on Understanding by Design are well worth exploring further and he also has a great website- www.jaymctighe.com where you can find lots of useful links to more information.

It was an amazing learning experience for me just to be in a big city! I managed (with assistance from friends) to work out the train system, the shuttle bus and even braved it on a small plane to get to Melbourne.  All very big steps for this country bumpkin!  

This was the view from our motel room. A lot different from the view from my window at home- The lights I see in the sky at night are stars!

I will write again after my next adventure to Melbourne.  Until then. 

Keep Smiling

Natalie Gherardin

a quest to being 'the best teacher I can be'

Well this year has gone by in a whirlwind; it feels as though we only just started the year, but here we are nearly half way through! So far this journey has led me to some interesting places, with much more to come. I am going to be honest and say that deciding on how to spend the grant money was difficult for me; being new to the teaching profession, and with limited contacts and a lesser sense of where teaching can lead me compared to my experienced counterparts. My principal helped me to think about my goals at this stage in my career and as an early career educator, my main priority is to improve what I have just finished studying; the teaching practice. I want to be the best teacher I can be, so it seemed fitting to put some of the money into assisting me with this professional goal. So far this year I have been able to fund my Masters degree in Gifted Education which has equipped me with knowledge to bring back to the classroom on how to extend my students. My school has also sent me to training for literacy coaching, which couples well with some of the content from my degree. I aim to implement the coaching and my Masters degree to extend those students who are boarderline 'A' students into achieving their best. The grant has also allowed me to travel to Melbourne just recently to attend the Hawker Brownlow conference with three other colleagues. Here we were schooled in important classroom strategies from how to construct effective student friendly learning plans, how to use Understanding by Design, and the implementation of classroom differentiation, to the effective use of music in the classroom. To say the least, I returned to school my head buzzing with fresh ideas; now just to find the time to put these into place! I also attended a workshop on using ICT, which blew me away when the presenter discussed the future of ICT for our students. It seems hard to fathom such exponential advancements in technology when we are such lateral thinkers, but the reality is our students need to be ready for an information communication savvy world, and what better place than to learn how to use this wisely than in the classroom. This sparked my interest in ICT, and I have promised myself that this is something I will follow up in my own classroom. Later this year I am to complete a workshop that teaches educators how to use Ipads, which will be useful for me to learn how to manipulate my new Ipad to its capacity.  I have also ordered some visualisers and an interactive classroom voting system for use in the Science laboratories. I am hoping this will digitalise my students learning and provide them with innovative ways to engage with Science. So, as you can see, this by no means is the end of my professional development journey, but merely the tip of the iceberg, and I hope to remain communicative as I continue my quest to being ‘the best teacher I can be’.

My Kitchen Garden Professional Development 2012

Winning the 2012 SA Public Teaching Award for Excellent School Support Staff was quite overwhelming.  I love my job and love being able to provide additional learning activities for the students at my school, it has been a truly humbling experience to have so many people acknowledge and congratulate me for the work that I do and for winning this wonderful award.  As I am only able to do the work that I do because of the supportive staff at my school, I decided quite early on that there was no better way to spend my scholarship than by involving them in this wonderful opportunity to extend not only my Professional Development but theirs as well.

Our school was in the process of setting up a Kitchen Garden program when I won this award so I spent the last term of last year doing a range of T&D around this.  I was able to take my Principal on a Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Tour which resulted in our school applying to become a Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden School ourselves.  We were extremely pleased to have had this application successfully processed early this year and we are looking forward to the training days scheduled for later this year for both the Kitchen and Garden lessons. 

I was also able to attend a number of training days at the Food Forest which helped me further my knowledge of vegetable growing and fruit tree care.  This new understanding was incredibly useful as I began my knew role as Garden Specialist at our school. I worked with staff and students to design, build and plant out our garden beds and orchard.  We used National Tree Day to plant our orchard and this enabled us to include our parents, local member of Parliament Tony Piccolo and local Greening Group in this fabulous activity making it a real community event.

Myself with Tony Piccolo, Josh McLean and Principal Deb Fairey after planting the first tree in our Orchard.

Another of the courses I did at the Food Forest was an Introduction to Permaculture which was thought provoking and inspiring and has lead to my enrolment in a Certificate in Permaculture Design which will take place at the Food Forest later this month.  I plan to incorporate many of these design principals into the schools garden area as it grows.  I did look into the Forest Schools training but decided that whilst this is a wonderful program and that students would benefit from structured outdoor learning opportunities, implementing the Kitchen Garden at our school was our main focus and finding ways of implementing this with Environmentally Friendly and Sustainable practises would be of most benefit to staff and students now and into the future.

To help get our Kitchen classes up and running I was able to bring Sprout (Callum Hann from Master Chef and his partner Themis Chryssidis a nutritionist) to our school to run a cooking and nutrition class for all of our staff, the session was fantastic, they cooked a variety of dishes for us and talked to us about good nutrition focusing on child friendly options that we will implement in our Kitchen classes, staff were also shown a range of cooking techniques and tips, I took the opportunity to show Callum and Themis our Kitchen space – they were impressed with our plans and provided invaluable advise in regard to the layout of the kitchen spaces and items that we should purchase as a start up kit for each space.

                                       Themis, myself and Callum during our cooking class.

Nature Based learning in England and Scotland.

Having searched for months and frustrated many people trying to help me - finally I am deliriously happy to be heading off on an exciting international study visit to the UK in October! (Fingers crossed) The tour will include meeting Claire Warden - the owner of the first outdoor nature Kindergarten in Scotland. Centres we will visit include Pen Green children's centre, Middlesborough, Wingate Children's centre, Dunblane, Cowgate Pre -5 centre, Edinburgh, Fowlis Wester and Auchlone Nature Kindergarten, Crieff, Scottish Crannog Centre , Kenmore!
The fact that the study visit will be linked to the National Australian Early Years Learning Framework is brilliant. I'm already looking forward to sharing my experience and promoting nature based learning when I get back!!!
Meanwhile - as part of my award I was able to buy a camera and laptop specifically for the children to use to capture snapshots and videos for editing, reflection and studying. The photos posted here have either been taken by the children of things that particularly interest them or taken by me of children engaged with nature with the idea to share with their peers for our 'Talking and Thinking FloorbooksTM' intentional learning groups. Enjoy!
For more information on Nature schools and kindergartens go to www.mindstretchers.com

Reflection on the TED talks

As part of the prize for Inspirational Leader of the Year in 2012 I was able to “buy” a membership of TED Live. TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences for "ideas worth spreading." The TED2013 conference just happened in the USA and was broadcast live. This meant I needed to be up from 5am to watch and so in most cases I downloaded to watch the next night. I tweeted the YouTube links as soon as they were public @SymoLyn

At the same time as watching TED my home Apple page just announced that ITunes U had just passed one billion content downloads. Similarly last month the Khan Academy announced they had just passed one billion exercise problems done using Khan Academy resources. These figures again show that the world of education is rapidly changing.

Back to TED! There were some good talks I watched, some OK and a few truly sensational! One of the truly sensational was that of Sugata Mitra in his acceptance of the TED prize ($1million). Now Sugata Mitra’s academic career is nothing short of phenomenal anyway and he has discoveries and publications across Science, Maths, Technology and now Education.

His popular acclaim now is through the Hole in the Wall experiments in children’s learning. In the initial experiment, a computer was placed in a "hole" created within a wall in a slum in Delhi, India and children were allowed to use it freely- even though it only had English and the children could not read or write in English. The experiment aimed at proving that kids could be taught by computers very easily without any formal training- and they certainly did learn. The experiment has since been repeated at many places throughout India and the rest of the world.

… “The Victorians created a global computer made up of people. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine,” says Mitra, in the bold opening of his talk. “In order to keep that running, you need lots and lots of people. They must be identical to each other … So they created a system, called school, to make parts [for this human computer]. They must have good handwriting, they must be able to read, and they must be able to add, subtract and do division.”
But these skills aren’t as necessary with the advent of computers. “It’s quite fashionable to say education system is broken,” says Mitra. “It’s not, It’s wonderfully constructed — it’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated.”
We can’t imagine the technology of the future, and thus we can’t know what jobs we’ll need the skills for. So Mitra suggests that education should be about developing the ability to learn anything on one’s own. …Sugata Mitra accepts the Ted Prize at Ted2013

We have seen glimpses of this ourselves when we handed Ipads to our preschoolers and watched them play- they experiment and learn and astonish and amaze us with what they can do in such a short period of time.

Sugata challenges us to have a new vision for learning through SOLE = Self Organizing Learning Environments as the old model of schooling was for another time that no longer exists. He believes we need to pose big questions (similar to our Adelaide University Compass program) and support our children through encouragement to develop their own curiosity and solve/answer/find information to develop their ability to learn anything!

In conclusion he made a bold TED Prize wish: “Help me build a place where children can explore and learn on their own -- and teach one another -- using resources from the worldwide cloud”. He asked us to develop SOLEs and then send the data and information to him such that the school in the cloud can truly develop.

WE were challenged if this was something MOCB12 could be part of as our small contribution to the future of learning?