West Melton School – KC kids

Julia Cider from West Melton School wanted a way to make the key competencies more meaningful to her students, so she transformed them into a set of child-friendly characters for her classroom – the 'KC Kids'.

This snapshot explains how the characters are used to help teachers and students deepen their understandings and use of the key competencies. 

The six characters called the KC Kids represent the key competencies. We have called them:

• team player
• respectful citizen
• self-believer
• self-manager
• thinker
• effective communicator.

One of the images that we use with the KC Kids show students travelling on a school bus. To connect with this during the first week back at school, everyone participated in bus rides that covered the route the school buses take. This gave the children an opportunity to be introduced to the KC Kids and learn about the key competencies as they travelled around their community. A highlight of the trip was stopping for morning tea at the Waimakariri River. 

Back at school the students had an opportunity to look at, and hold, the life-sized images of the KC Kids. As a class they discussed each one and what each character represented. Using an enlarged map of the local area the class highlighted the school and the route they had travelled on the bus, also identifying where each child lived. This linked the launch of the KC Kids with their inquiry unit of ‘personal journeys’.

The KC Kids are now an important aspect of teaching and learning at West Melton School. Students can relate to them, and they learn lifelong skills through their inclusion in classroom programmes. Each term, two KC Kids are chosen as a focus and are developed through the curriculum learning areas. Using the KC Kids as a medium in which to teach students about the key competencies is proving very effective.

At the end of each day a ‘KC Kid of the day’ award is given to one student in the class, with specific feedback relating to our KC Kids given to the class as a whole. This award is something that the children look forward to, every afternoon.

Key competencies
The teachers at West Melton School use KC Kids to bring the key competencies to life. Students explore and develop the capabilities that each character represents across a range of learning areas. With appropriate teacher guidance and feedback, they can self-monitor and evaluate their use of the key competencies to identify future goals.

Tags:

key competencies

primary

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