The Active Learner System

Michael Lau explains how Kahikatea's learning system works:

In Kahikatea, we have a very helpful and effective active learner system. The most important thing is the FIP, or First Important Priority. Every Monday we plan the week ahead with the FIP.

The FIP helps us to plan what we do for every maths and literacy sessions each week. For maths, we have to do a certain amount of activities each week. For literacy, Sandy shows us a list of tasks that are normally due every Friday. It is up to us to decide what to do each session and how long it will take us.

The next component we have is our lives. Everybody starts off with 2  reading, writing, maths and inquiry lives. We can lose a life for making mistakes, not working hard enough or not being an active learner. If we lose 3 lives, then the teacher tells us what to do instead of us deciding what to do.

An important tool for our learning is our Chrome books. We have 15 in the class, with 25 students. For literacy, around half of our activities involve using the Chrome books and for maths you are allowed 3 ten minute sessions on a Chromebook using Sumdog.

These are the main components for our Active Learner System. As you can see, our Active Learner system is a fair and just system. It gives all 25 of us a chance to become great Active Learners.
By Michael Lau.


Liam's Thoughts:
In our class we have strange rules that other classrooms don't have. Although they are unusual, they keep us focused and keep us from being distracted.

Te first ones are called lives. We have two lives for every subject in class i.e: Writing and reading. Once you lose a life you cannot regain one until the next term. If you lose both of your lives, you must do what the teacher says when the teacher says it.

Unlike some other classrooms we have a strict deadline when somethings have to be done. I we think we can't complete the task before the deadline then we need to take what we need home and complete it. (but if we don't return it we lose both our lives.)

Lastly we have F.I.Ps which stands for First Important Priorities. They're basically a timeline which we fill in so we finish what we need to finish before the deadline.

I know this class is really strict, but it's for the better, without these rules we wouldn't stay focused. 

By Liam Buckrell

Sophie Says:

This year kahikatea we are doing things a little differently.  Each student is becoming an active learner, we are working on making our own decisions on the most important piece of work to be finished by a certain date.  Each week we are given a document fulled with tasks, the tasks could involve chrome books or reading, writing or inquiry books. But they are due by a certain date, and that's when F.I.P charts come in.

Each week we are given a F.I.P where we write down that was on the document and put all the work into the slots so you can plan your week .  F.I.P stands for First Important Priority so on your chart you write down the most important things and since the activities are all due a different times we have to prioritize everything so we get everything done, if you don't finish 'you lose a life.'

Each student is given two lives, the subjects that involves the life system are reading, writing, maths and inquiry. How it works, we have a big white board split into quarters, in each quarter is every ones names cut up.  Each quarter is drawn up in thirds (horizontal lines) you want to be as close to the top of the thirds as possible.  By the top line is the number two (standing for two lives) on the next line is one then on the next on is nothing which means you've got no lives and you are not an active learner.  You can also loose a live if your book was not handed in or does not reach Sandy's standard.  In total you get eight lives but you cannot carry over lives eg; if you lost all your maths lives you can't use your reading live to again make your own choices and become an active learner.

The reason we are even bothering to change our whole learning system and become active learners is so we can be more independent, so we are not relying on the teacher to tell us the instructions for the task, also doing this makes us more organised because we have a deadline so we have to learn how to handle deadlines so when we get older that will help us to become successful.

Overall, I think what we are doing is really helpful and it's really helping kahikatea become more independent learners,also having to prioritize our work is a very helpful skill.

By: Sophie