Five Flaxmere FM
Learning with real frequency
Morgan Tait
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Irongate School students Karlos Te Kahu, 11, (front left) and Myer Crawford-Pakoti, 11, (front right), helped by Classic Hits presenters Sarah Van der Kley and Martin Good, get their first taste of being on air.
Photo / Duncan Brown
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Five Flaxmere schools are making waves in their community - radio waves that is, on specially designed station Flaxmere FM.
Irongate School, Peterhead School, Flaxmere Primary School, Kimi Ora School and Flaxmere College are broadcasting each day on 107.2 FM between 11am and midday.
Irongate School teacher Tony McCann set-up Flaxmere FM as a way for students to interact with the community and learn a range of different skills.
"These are school notices, students' work - where children are able to have shout-outs and read stories they have written etcetera - sports news and community news." he said.
Mr McCann said each school has a one-hour slot, one day per week, and the signal covers all of Flaxmere.
"The Irongate school radio crew now divide the one hour broadcast into 15 min slots and allocate specific topics to each slot.
"These are broad topics of course but they will remain in those specific 15 min time slots so the listeners have a general idea of the sequence within that one hour broadcast each week.
"Although it is essentially a school radio station, we do hope to have more of a community input as we gain experience.
"The 15-minute community news slot will initially be used to interview guests from the community."
Already students were showing signs of streamlining their craft, he said.
"The children are doing a wonderful job at running the whole thing.
"When they first started they would ... simply read a script. Towards the end of last term we then had two of the broadcasters from the local radio station Classic Hits.
"Some of our radio children asked them a few questions about their broadcasting experience and one of the things that came out of this discussion was the fact that these professionals use notes instead of complete scripts when they go on air.
"We decided to give this a go this term and it has been very successful."
© Hawke's Bay Today May 24th, 2012.
This material remains © APN Holdings NZ Limited and is only to be used for non-commercial personal or research use. Any other use requires permission of the copyright holder.
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