Living Heritage - Tikanga Tuku Iho

Living Heritage -

Upper Moutere School

Our Story, Our Place

Research Process

How Did We Do It?

The School followed the Living Heritage Project Path to develop our learning.

Room 1 Inquiry Learning

Step 1 Plan

We decided on the Topic ‘What’s Our Story?’ to gather information for our School Reunion

We planned to gather information from a number of sources:

  1. Our grandparents
  2. Our parents
  3. Ourselves

We established a set of research questions for our grandparents. We planned to invite them to Grandparents Day so we could interview them.

We also created a sheet to compare and contrast our lives with those of our grandparents and our parents.

Step 2 Explore

We had a lot of fun on Grandparents Day interviewing some grandparents and talking about life in their school day. They enjoyed coming into a modern day classroom and having some of our work presented to them.

We also completed a mini research project by talking to both our grandparents and parents about their life when they were our age. We enjoyed collecting lots of photos to illustrate the changes over the years.

From here we also decided that we would like to experience more about what life was like at school in the olden days:

  • We planned a trip to Bishop School
  • We turned the Sarau Room (the oldest classroom) into an old fashioned classroom for the morning

We found life very different to what it is today! We all agreed that we would much rather be in a modern day classroom.

Step 3 Choose

We chose what information was to be recorded:

  • Our research findings from our interviews with our grandparents.
  • Our research findings from our mini research project with our grandparents, our parents and ourselves.
  • Our stories about our visit to Bishop School and the Sarau Room.
  • A number of digital photographs of the process we went through.
Step 4 Create
  • We displayed our interview sheets from Grandparents Day.
  • We collated our research findings from our project into a comparison table and displayed photos around the outside to illustrate the changes over time.
  • We completed a slideshow with some of our stories from our visit to Bishop School.
Step 5 Share

We shared our learning by displaying research around the room and at assembly presentations. Of course a big sharing occasion was the reunion presentation that the whole school performed to a large crowd on Saturday afternoon. Let's not forget putting our project on Living Heritage!

Step 6 Review

We looked back over our process and outcomes and must say we were very pleased. The teachers are planning to continue inquiry learning, building on what they achieved this year, only making next time even better.