Fale

fale; house
fale o'o: a Samoan beach hut

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.
When life gives you wood, you build a house. And that's what we're doing!

Together with Dee, a Year 2/3 teacher, we are working together this year to provide an integrated curriculum for her wonderful students. The goal; to build a fale o'o. The purpose; to provide shelter for breaks but also, another cultural element to our school environment. This project requires community input so we are both excited to see this come to life. 

Session 1 - talanoa about the what we want and the why. We both know that we want fale for our school. We shared ideas of our past experiences of a fale and shared how we want it to look like and be made. We both agree that we want fale and that we want the students and community to be involved as much as possible. We've been given the green light to make this happen. That's all we needed. It's much harder to build here than it is in Samoa. Lots of regulations to be aware of and terms to know. Both Dee and I don't specialise in the construction/carpentry but we're so passionate about seeing this come to life so we spent the morning at Bunnings with our new friend Tomui. A Tongan man who clearly knows his stuff! Woo hoo, what a blessing. 

Session 2 - Talanoa with a structure. We met and unpacked specific things we wanted for this fale. Poles. Flooring. Roofing. What materials we need, or think we need. It's important to reach out and ask, so I did. A dear friend of mine led a similar project for a school he worked at and made it happen there. We found what company they used, who the key contacts were and shared how it all came about. 

The biggest thing for us is that this is an opporutnity for learning and building relationships with our school community. We want the kids to do the learning, the exploring, the building and then they can celebrate their contribution to our school. 

At this point in time, the learning looks like
Maths - measurement; actual measuring of materials, costs, ratio and proportions
Literacy - reading and learning about the importance of fale, why homes are important, look at the different houses around the world and explore what they're made of (windows and mirrors), myths and legends and connecting it to the language weeks. Letter writing to Mr Herlihy with proposal, 

Term 2 - planning 
Term 3 - prototype making 
Term 4 - big fale on way 

We know that this is a BIG project so we are allowing the time to explore, learn and create. There's still a whole lot more to unpack, but we'll leave that for the next blog post. 

Next step: 
Unpack the plan - what other teaching and learning opportunities are there within this? 
How can we relate this back to specific learning goals? - Look at school matrix. 
How can we set our learners up for success? 
Look at matrices and start unpacking this for Dee and her learners. We'll do part of this process together but I'll make a start specifically for this project.