Education for Enterprise – Lyall Bay School radio station

"Welcome back to Maranui FM Sweet Sounds of the Surf 106.7 on your dial – I’m Logan, (and I’m Holly), and it’s not a very good day today, is it Holly? (No, it’s quite cloudy, in fact just like last Friday)….”

Maranui FM is a real radio station set up by Lyall Bay Primary School. We broadcast to most of South Wellington.

Logan: We have the main announcer’s area which we take turns at having each day, so I’d be main announcer today and she’d be main announcer tomorrow, Holly would.

Holly: So I’ll be sitting here, and I can control the computer and we just touch four dials here…

Holly: And it’s not just announcers; we have jobs in marketing, publicity, advertising, reviewing, newsreading and website development.

Clint Chalmers, Lead Teacher: The benefits for those children are quite amazing, actually, because what they are doing is any of the work they’re doing for the radio station, it involves a real-life context – they’re actually seeing what they produce out there in the community, they’re getting response back from the community, so for those children involved there’s a lot of benefits. The benefits for me? I’m not sure about the benefits for me yet, um, it’s just the joy of working with the kids, and just seeing the way the children are developing as they go along.

Holly: And don’t forget you can email us on [email protected], (fades out)….

Paul Soma, BoT Chair: Well I think what it’s done Elizabeth, it’s allowed our children to think outside the box, and I say that literally, so I guess it’s put them in the wider community and how a commercial enterprise works, such as a radio station or any commercial enterprise, so I guess it’s what it’s taken them from is “what is curriculum” and what is “the learning that goes on outside school” once they leave school some way down the track, and I think for them to be involved in that at this early stage, at either intermediate or secondary school, is fantastic.

Chatting with children: So what are you going to be interviewing Mr Thompson about?

Children: The Parent/Teacher interviews…

Voiceover: These are two of our reporters on their way to interview the Principal. They write news for the newsreaders to read.

Child: What are the parents in the school getting out of these interviews?

Mr Thompson: We just hope that the interviews are a good opportunity for the teachers to talk about children’s learning in the school.

Interviewer: Clint, you are focusing on some enterprising attributes, so you are focusing on planning and organising, being flexible and dealing with change, working with others and in teams, and generating, identifying and assessing opportunities. I suppose I just wanted to ask you why you chose those attributes?

Clint: Well I think those attributes fit quite well into everything we’re doing; they have to work as team for a start, now we’ve had a number of occasions where the newsreaders haven’t got the news early enough, or they haven’t picked it up early enough to practice it properly, and there’s some words in there that they haven’t come across before and they’ve made some strange pronunciations on air, but that’s fine, so they do need to work as team, and as I said to the children “If the news reporters haven’t collected the news, the newsreaders won’t have any news, and the announcers are then going to have to ad lib” and so on, so they need to work as a team, and we do have team meetings where we sit down and discuss what needs to be done. They have to be extremely flexible.

Teacher: So you guys need to decide, we’ve done the pens, the t-shirts are underway, what do we focus on next?

Child: Getting more money.

Teacher: Well definitely getting more money, so we need to write over there so what’s a follow up for the marketers– sell more advertising.

Voiceover: This is a meeting of the Marketing Team with the Sales Team.

Paul: Our children went out and basically attacked the local commercial community down the road, and raised some fantastic money, I won’t mention the amount, but you’re aware of the amount.

Children: We are here to offer you a 1 to 20 second ad. on our radio station, every hour 24/7, for $150 per year or $50 per term. Your ad. will be heard by listeners in Lyall Bay, Miramar, Strathmore, Kilbirnie, Greta Point and Moa Point if the weather is fine

Paul: And I think the response rate coming back was 100%, and again these children were made to go outside their normal zone and go out and market themselves.

Ad Buyer: Thank you very much for the offer, it sounds very promising from our point of view

Paul: So I think immediately, within one day, it’s put the name of Maranui FM up front and the community are 100% behind it, the commercial community I’m talking about.

Dennis Thompson, Principal: It was just fantastic to see that the community was buying into that, and that’s endless as well that I can see, just having the school out in the community and the learning opportunities for the children, just so exciting.

Children: Hi everyone I’m Irving (and I’m Brayden) and we’re here to review the show “Ben Ten”

Voiceover: Being a reviewer is another job on Maranui FM.

Dennis: It just gives us so many opportunities that we had never considered before - as far as the new curriculum goes, I think looking at the Key Competencies for a start, anything to do with enterprise and education just fits perfectly with the key competencies.

Voiceover: The work we’re doing now could help us get jobs when we grow up.

Logan and Holly: It’s actually quite fun being an announcer – you have to prepare a lot of work but when you’re going on it’s actually really really fun. Yeah, it is an option (everyone’s been saying that to me and Logan) but yeah, I haven’t really decided what I’m going to be when I grow up, but this is – yeah, I might do this. We’re actually doing quite well – at the beginning we were going on for 10 minutes and that was alright, but now we’re going on for an hour and we’re doing really well, aren’t we Holly? Yeah, it’s really really fun, but sometimes it can be really hard work.

Clint: It does involve a lot of work outside normal school work for the children, and there’s been a lot of support with the parents – we’ve had a number of comments from those parents whose children are working at home and they’re saying “Oh yeah, they’re working away and they’re writing up their plans…. yeah it’s great.

Interviewer: What’s the best part about it?

Logan and Holly: Being able to tell everyone about stuff that we like to talk about, because we have times when we can just talk about anything we want.” like “Do you know what’s really funny about my cat…?

Logan and Holly: I like ad libbing a lot, and I like telling the jokes! “What’s big and red and eats rocks? – Ah, a big red rock-eater?” 

Dennis: The other thing is, with the whole purpose of reaching out to the community as well, and looking and considering other schools in our area as part of our community – we’ve had discussions with other schools in our cluster area about how we can look at Enterprise in Education as part of the new curriculum, and really exciting, we’re linking with not just primary schools like we are but with the intermediate school and the secondary school, about how we can work together and have a vision for the whole area relating to this, so it’s really exciting and it just gives us so many more new ways to look at what we’re doing in the school. We’re really excited, we think that it’s just opening up so many new opportunities for the school and it’s really exciting.

Logan and Holly: “OK well here’s another song for you it’s called 'Living on a Prayer' by Bon Jovi” (Holly) “And it’s dedicated to my mum, because she likes Bon Jovi, so if you’re listening Mum, here it is …..(music)”