Nau mai, haere mai
Welcome to Te Waka
The following is a little bit of information we would love to share with you all about Te Waka which is our area for our older tamariki (who are normally 4 years of age up).
Te Waka follows the IMPACT philosophy each and every day. Our philosophy goes like this: we aim to provide a safe, secure, and warm ‘home away from home’ environment. We embrace Te Ao Māori and value whanaungatanga and manaakitanga as our ‘way of being’.
We pride ourselves on our ability to create respectful relationships with tamariki, whānau, and our community. Our approach is inclusive of all children, ensuring a strong foundation of cultural identity in collaboration with family and whānau. Our kaupapa focuses on working alongside your child—encouraging them to become confident and competent learners, as we celebrate each child’s unique individuality.
The needs and interests of all children are valued and recognised, encouraging each child to become an independent and lifelong learner. We plan a wide range of experiences based on your child’s interests that contribute to a varied and exciting, rich learning community.
In Te Waka, we work hard to provide our tamariki with the skills they need to make the transition to kura (school). Our tamariki look forward to going to kura, and they expect it to be different, but they do not always anticipate just how different the expectations, structures, and routines may be. By working together—kaiako, new entrant teachers, parents, and whānau (and, where involved, specialist support services)—we can support children’s learning continuity as they make this crucial transition.
Te Waka is very different from Te Awa and Te Moana (our under 2 and over 2 space), as we focus on building and enhancing the skills your child needs to succeed at school. We have some very special rituals throughout the day that help to ensure the wellbeing and sense of belonging your child needs to feel safe and secure while in Te Waka, which enables their māia (confidence) to grow.
Do we do lessons like you would expect to see in a school classroom environment? No, we don’t. In early childhood, we believe that learning is the byproduct of connection-building. Young children make connections by embracing and experimenting with their curiosities, engaging their senses, and sharing meaningful moments with caregivers (kaiako, whānau). If you look around you, you can see that we are naturally surrounded by all sorts of things in our environment that allow us to explore numbers, letters, shapes, and colours every single day.
We do encourage valuable skills such as self-help skills, keeping themselves safe from harm, knowing how to speak up so their needs are met, recognising and appreciating their own ability to learn, using a range of strategies and skills to play and learn with others, moving confidently and challenging themselves physically, and making sense of their worlds by generating and refining working theories—just to name a few.
Inquiry Learning
What is this? In Te Waka, we follow the Reggio Emilia approach, which focuses on wondering with children about what they experience, think, and feel—and on encouraging children to make sense of their world. Inquiry learning is therefore flexible and responsive to children’s motivations, interests, contexts, and what is meaningful in their lives.
This means that this week we could be learning all about our emotions, but next week we might observe our tamariki taking a keen interest in bugs found at IMPACT. So, we would then provide experiences to scaffold and extend that interest. You could say there is never a dull moment in Te Waka, as we are always investigating or ako (learning about something new).
208 Maunu Rd, Whangarei.