Origins: A three day arts adventure with Owhango school

This learning story comes from Owhango school – a small rural school in King Country. Owhango school has 47 children, 2 teachers (Emma and Jessie) and a principal (Ewan) with a real passion for the arts. Ewan applied for funding for PLD and that’s how come I got to spend the last two years visiting the school and working with them to deepen their classroom practice in drama, dance and music – what a joy! We finished up our time together last month with this three day adventure based around the Māori creation story.

While it’s not an example of mantle of the expert, our teaching and learning did include some dramatic inquiry moments and shows how drama can be integrated with other arts and with literacy so I thought I’d post for your interest (mostly I just want to record the rosy times spent with this lovely school!)

The planning for the drama aspects of this unit of work was adapted from a process drama I created with staff from Knighton School in Hamilton earlier in the year … a great example of sharing practice around. Thanks to both schools. Thanks also Ewan for permission to share these images. Story extracts and the atua puppets were created from Peter Gossage’s picture book In the beginning…

CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO LEARNING STORY