What a day of learning looks like here

Play-based, personalised, and built on the Walker Learning Approach. Children who choose are children who care — so we start from curiosity and let the reading, writing and maths grow out of it.

[ photo — junior class ] Years 0–2 · Kōhungahunga Settling in and reading The Walker Learning Approach: creative play and personalised investigations first, so oral language comes before — and leads into — reading and writing.

[ photo — middle school ] Years 3–4 · Waenganui Finding what they're good at Longer investigations, first teams, and a real say in what gets studied. Te reo Māori across the school one day a week.

[ photo — seniors leading ] Years 5–6 · Tuākana Learning to lead Our Innovative Learning Environment — four classrooms built around Thornburg’s five learning spaces. Inter-school sport from Year 4, and the move to intermediate.

The five learning spaces

We build our rooms around David Thornburg’s idea that learning needs five kinds of space. A child moves between all five in a day.

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8.30am Classrooms openChildren come in and get themselves ready for the day. Classes begin at 9.00.

Watering Hole Learning from each otherPeer teaching and the news of the day. Everyone is learner and teacher at once.

Cave & Mountain Top Alone, then in front of everyoneThe Cave is deep work without interruption. The Mountain Top is where that work gets shared and celebrated. Morning interval 10.30–11.00.

12.30pm Lunch, 12.30 to 1.15Forty-five minutes. Enough to actually finish the game, which is the point. A lunch ordering scheme runs alongside.

Sandpit & Campfire Hands on, then storiesThe Sandpit is making, testing and getting it wrong. The Campfire is discussion and storytelling. Juniors finish 2.40, the rest of the school 2.50.

Across the curriculum

Literacy

Built on oral language first — the motivation and the opportunity to talk — and the 6+1 Traits of Writing above that.

Mathematics

One of the best schools in the country, officially, at teaching reading, writing and maths — and we think children need more than that too.

Te reo me ngā tikanga

Te reo Māori taught across the whole school one day a week, and our Four Original Languages and People and the Land programmes.

Enviro, garden and Zero Heroes

Zero Heroes, the enviro group, the garden and the recyclers. Toitū te whenua, toitū te moana, toitū te tangata.

The arts

Creativity through play runs right through the junior school, and Book Characters day is an institution here.

Sport & play

Inter-school fixtures from Year 4, school netball teams every year — and we have been national Rippa Rugby and Jump Jam champions.

We teach through relationships, not around them

Our approach follows Professor Russell Bishop’s Teaching to the North East — relationship-based learning, a form of culturally responsive pedagogy. If we are to address educational inequality, positive relationships have to sit at the very centre of what we do. Everything else is less productive without it.

So we run our classrooms as if they were extended families. That is where children learn to care and be cared for, to hold expectations and to meet them — and it is where what a child already knows, and how they make sense of the world, is allowed to matter.

With others

A teacher who knows a child can teach that child. In the Natal tribes of South Africa the greeting is Sawubona — I see you — and the answer is ngikhona, I am here. That is the whole of it.

With ourselves

Belonging first. Owen Eastwood writes that in the South Pacific the three most powerful words you can hear are you belong here. A child who belongs will risk being wrong, and that is where learning starts.

With the land

Papatūānuku. He taonga no te whenua, me hoki ano ki te whenua — what is given by the land should return to the land. We are from the land and of the land.

The factory model of school was built to turn out workers for an industrial age. Its time is past. Our purpose now is learning to thrive in a transforming world.

The four original languages

The printing press is about a thousand years old. Music, visual language, story-telling and movement are as old as we are. They are how our brains are built to take learning in and give it back out. It is neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about something you do not care about — so we start where the caring is.

Music

Rhythm, melody and song — the first way most children join in, before they have the words.

Visual language

Mark-making, colour, image and symbol. Older than the printing press by tens of thousands of years.

Story-telling

How a culture passes itself on. Every child is the listener and, in time, the teller.

Movement

The body thinking. Dance, play, sport, gesture — learning that happens before it is spoken.

“Our learners can learn anything, any time, anywhere, with anyone. What they most need to learn is the discernment to sift and sort it into something useful.”

From the school’s own design philosophy

Things worth reading

September 2025How screen time affects childhood developmentMaria Fernanda Rincon, on quality of content, opportunity cost and a child’s age — rather than a hard hourly limit.July 2021Ten things every parent should know about playWhy play is how children learn, and what they are learning while they do it.July 2021Learning through structured play, the WHS wayHow the Walker Learning Approach looks in our own junior classrooms.September 2017Helping your child at homePractical sheets for reading, writing and maths, in nineteen short documents.September 2017Seesaw digital portfolioHow to see your child’s work as they make it, and comment on it.March 2021Learning @ homeCreative home-learning ideas, and our home learning site.

Come and see a morning for yourself

Once you enrol, our Deputy Principal for New Entrant Parent Liaison arranges a pre-entry visit — a tour, the classrooms, the teachers and other parents starting at the same time.

Book a tour Enrolment info

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