Meet the new kid on the Nova Pioneer Block: Our Ruimsig campus. Nova Pioneer Ruimsig is located on the beautiful and quiet neighborhood of Amorosa Ext 27 in Ruimsig, Roodepoort.  The school opened its door to the Roodepoort communities in January this year.  It covers both pre-primary and primary education from Grade 000 to Grade 2, with a grade being added every year to ensure we grow with our little Novaneers.

 

 

The Campus

Set on an expansive 36 200m squared property, the school boasts an elegant building with modern contemporary architectural. Each element is intentionally designed to create a harmonious learning environment that stimulates curiosity and joy of learning for all the students. The glass wall class partitions opens up our school to form one open learning space. This is designed to promote collaborations and inspire confidence and creativity, while allowing positive distractions and cross-class engagements.

Our unique classrooms provide our little Novaneers with a platform to engage and learn in a group setup or as an individual. Our desks are arranged in 5 centers allowing group engagements and team participation of 6 students. This allows for different activities to take place and students to engage in the content being taught in a different way.

 

The Curriculum

The school offers an English medium Cambridge curriculum delivered using our unique enquiry-based learning approach. This ensures our Novaneers are learning to think and behave like leaders and innovators. Our lessons are designed to promote confidence and communication and all students work on solving real world problems. From ideation, prototyping to building and deploying their solution on campus and beyond. 

Robotics and coding are introduced to all students from as early as Grade R to prepare our Novaneers to thrive in a rapidly developing digital world and allows them to configure computer or robotics based solutions to shape the African century of automation and digital revolution.

 

 

The Facilities 

Our Campus boasts a variety of extra-curricular facilities such as a swimming pool available to all students from Grade R to participate in swimming lessons. We also have a basketball/Netball court, Tennis court and a soccer field where our kids are able to play, stay active and develop their talents while we carry opportunities to learn into the playground. The Nova Pioneer Ruimsig Campus is under the incredible leadership of Mrs Carla Hercules who has extensive experience and skills in school leadership.  

 

Contact Us 

Nono Masunyane is the school’s Brand and Admission Associate who will gladly welcome you to the school and assist you with everything you need from application, child assessment to enrolment.

You can contact Nono directly for a new application or more information about our school on 076 662 8616 or send an email to admissions.ruimsig@novapioneer.com.

Nova Pioneer has introduced International Benchmark Assessment tool called MAP (Measuring Academic Progress) at all campuses. The tool helps us identify student strengths and areas of need. It also allows teachers to better prepare students for their exams.

 

Creating cross-geo consistencies

Our shared mission as Nova Pioneer is to build a network of high-quality schools across the continent that are fostering the next generation of innovators and leaders. We are currently operating 10 schools across South Africa and Kenya, and central to our work is using global best practices to build a coherent and powerful curriculum.

In our primary schools, in addition to being grounded in the Cambridge International Curriculum in South Africa, we are also using leading world programming, like Singapore Maths and THRASS from the UK, to further deep learning and competency-building in our students.

As we operate schools across multiple countries, at our inception, we researched global assessments that would allow us to measure the growth of our students, independent of the curriculum of the country we operate in. After rigorous research, we decided to use an international benchmark assessment tool that we refer to as ‘MAP’. This tool allows us to measure the growth students are experiencing in our schools across countries so that we can continue to ground our work focused on the growth of our schools and children.

 

 

Academic rigor is a must

Another core component of our vision is in making sure that all students grow academically while they are with us. This growth is measured in a number of ways, including: Termly assessments; end of unit assessments; verbal communication; written communication; portfolios; reading growth assessments; plus informal exit tickets and continuous assessments of and for learning – all at relevant grades.

We seek to have multiple points of contact in what and how students are learning so that we can continue to support their accelerated and meaningful growth. A key part of that constellation of assessments that allow us to get a picture of how students are doing is through MAP.

 

 

Measuring growth over time

The MAP assessments are skill-based, and curriculum related, which is critical as 145 countries are using the tool and each may have different curriculum mandates. At its core, MAP is a computer-based, adaptive test, with each student being presented with a unique set of questions based on their responses to prior questions. The assessment is focused on measuring growth over time. As such, learners take an assessment at the beginning of the year, in the middle of the year, and the end of the year. MAP software is able to determine growth goals based on the initial assessment and then measure progress.

Entrepreneurial skills can be taught but they can only be strengthened when you practice in real life, what you learn in the classroom. In an effort to further invest in teaching and honing our students’ entrepreneurial skills, Nova Pioneer introduced Entrepreneurs Day at all campuses. Entrepreneurship Day was specifically designed to expose students to real-life situations and life lessons.

 

Entrepreneurs create jobs

We know that, in order to thrive as adults, today’s children will need to know how to problem-solve, work collaboratively, and communicate well but more importantly. All these skills will be critical to develop a capacity to start a business and also to think creatively and ambitiously. 

There will always be a need for teachers, doctors, lawyers and accountants but the job market will change significantly over the next two decades and many of the jobs which we rely on for employment may not exist. Children need to learn the skills that will position them to innovative in order to invent and shape their own careers.

For example, in May this year, South Africa’s unemployment rate increased to 27.6% in the first quarter of 2019, according to Stats SA. The jobless rate at the end of the fourth quarter of 2018 was 27.1%, meaning the rate increased by half a percentage point. We need to prepare students to be self-starters if we want to see the rate of unemployment drop. Entrepreneurs create jobs.

Learning the three r’s (reading, writing and arithmetic) are no longer sufficient to prepare today’s children for their future. Furthermore, in addition to these basic skills, all children need a thorough grounding in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Yet, children will need more than academic skills to succeed as adults, no matter what field they work in.

 

 

Putting the entrepreneurial skills into practice

Nova Pioneer has introduced an initiative across all its classes which focuses on fostering a solid understanding of entrepreneurship while supporting students in developing skills such as goal setting, working with money, people skills and basic marketing principles.

Entrepreneurship education benefits students from all socioeconomic backgrounds because apart from teaching core business skills, it trains students to think outside the box and nurtures unconventional talents and skills. Putting this into practice, our Primary schools students got an opportunity to host and participate in their own Entrepreneurs Days. 

Learners are encouraged to actively identify gaps to provide services/products that meet a need and are required to set a goal of the amount of money they aim to raise, as well specifying the cause or goal the funds would be used for. Learners take ownership of the marketing around the school and raise awareness of the event, supported by teachers who oversee the process and guide the students throughout this initiative. 

 

 

Finding the gap and filling it

Entrepreneurship day was specifically designed to expose students to real-life situations and life lessons. They were asked to identify a goal (what they would like to buy with the money they will make), and duties were distributed amongst one another.  On the day, they set up and sold the products and services to the rest of the school. 

They are encouraged to actively solve problems by using principles from the engineering design process:  research, brainstorm, select a solution, develop a prototype, test and revise it if necessary and then communicate the offering and benefits.  Through this process students develop skills like communication, presentation, pitching, understanding risk-taking, failure and building resilience, using models to solve problems. All schools across the Nova Pioneer network actively promote and develop entrepreneurship skills as part of its curriculum.

We’re not just showing and talking to our students about entrepreneurship as a concept. We are creating real-to-life opportunities for our students to be future-fit in a way that combines creativity, real-world skills, enjoyment and a true sense of accomplishment. If we plant seeds of entrepreneurial thinking early enough and nurture them constantly, today’s students will become tomorrow’s leaders and will be well-placed to meaningfully contribute to society and the economy.

This article was published in The Young Independents