Online resources supporting te reo and tikanga Māori

We use a lot of online tools for teaching te reo Māori and for supporting staff in their own professional learning. So staff and children are using various online resources to help them with the teaching and learning of te reo Māori and tikanga Māori.

In our Māori sessions on a Monday afternoon we go onto a website called TKI. It helps us to learn about traditions on a marae and customs and how to prepare a hāngi and things that you need to do in order to do that.

We’ve developed a site that is unique just to our school called ‘Taha Māori @ Te Kura o Tiori.’ That site at the moment is just for children and staff and in the future that will be for the whole community and be just another part of our website.

There’s some translations of some school values and they’ll translate them into Māori so that you can also go onto the school website and learn about the Māori words and how they fit into the culture with the school.

The intention of that site is to bring together a whole range of different elements of our whānau hui action plan including basic vocabulary in te reo Māori, tikanga as well as the development of our graduate profile, for what we want our tamariki to be like when they leave and the sorts of experiences that we want to offer and ensure that they are connected to their whakapapa and their community.

Our local runanga are really interested in how we are incorporating the values of our school that have been a result of our curriculum design into the values of the local runanga for Taumutu.

The Board of Trustees have been committed to supporting the development of te reo Māori and tikanga Māori in the school and will continue that commitment because it’s a really critical strength in our school and in our community. It’s something that we want to grow and so we have, this year we have one staff member on Te Manawa Pou. That programme is an e-learning enhanced language programme for teachers and that’s making a real difference for that teacher and that learning is being shared back to the staff.