Metaphors help students celebrate difference
Leah Johnston is the wind ruffling through your hair. Boston Smith is the ball being smashed into the goal.
All 29 Broadgreen Intermediate students from Room Four have been creating metaphors to describe themselves.
The results can then be slotted together to form a mosaic that says: ‘‘Talk with people who help you see the world differently.’’
For Broadgreen Intermediate those people are the students from Te Hihi School in Papakura.
‘‘We are learning how other peoples’ lives are different from ours,’’ said 12-year-old Leah.
The school received a box of stationery from Warehouse Stationery and the boxes were was filled with postcards.
Each student wrote a metaphor on the back of the cards and coloured it in.
The Broadgreen students joined in with 3000 classrooms from across the country that swapped a parcel of student writing with another class from a vastly different part of New Zealand.
Te Hihi School has 200 students and is in rural South Auckland. Broadgreen has more than 400 students and sits in suburban Stoke.
Teacher Rachel Phillips said the process was a good way of developing an ongoing relationship with another school and also getting students to work with developing their English language skills.