Kia ora koutou,

It’s been another exciting and busy fortnight in Koru! Here’s a quick recap of what we've been up to.

Celebrating Maths in the Koru Team

Last week was Maths Week, and we had so much fun with numbers! We tackled tricky problems, solved clever riddles, and practised counting to 10 in Te Reo Māori. This week, we've shifted our focus to telling time, learning to recognise the big hand and the little hand on a clock and what they tell us.

Disco Fun!

We had a fantastic time at the PTA disco. A big thank you to all the whānau who came along. The children all looked amazing, and their dance moves were incredible!

Unlocking the World of Coding

We’ve started a new unit on digital technology, where we're learning all about coding. We discovered that coding is just another way of saying programming or instructing. 

We talked about the similarities and differences between humans and robots.

• We both have a brain: Our brain tells us what to do and where to go, and a robot has a 'brain' (a CPU or Central Processing Unit) that tells it the same thing. 

• We both need food: Humans need food for energy and to help our brains think. A robot's 'food' is the code we give it, which tells it what to do.

There are some big differences, too. A robot can do many things, but it needs a human to programme it. And unlike humans, a robot can't show kindness or care.

We've been using special arrow cards to help us code. An up arrow means forward, a down arrow means backward, and left or right arrows are for turning. We've learned that a turn card needs to be followed by a forward or backward card to make our bots move.

We’ve also been introduced to the bug card! We hold this up whenever our code doesn't work the way we planned. Finding a "bug" is a great way to learn, as we have to use our problem-solving skills to debug and fix our code.

Keeping Ourselves Safe

This week, we started our Keeping Ourselves Safe unit. Tamariki have been learning some important personal information, including their full name, home address, parents’ names, and their phone numbers. They drew pictures of their homes to help describe them and talked about what makes each of them special and unique.

We had a special visitor, Constable Meg, who taught us how to identify a police officer and the correct names for our body parts. It's so important that we know the proper terms for our bodies to help us stay safe.

Just a Few Reminders

To help our mornings run smoothly, please remember to:

• Have your child bring in their literacy folder and put it in the correct box.

• Give your child a happy "kiss and drop" at the door.

• Please check your child’s lunchbox to make sure there are no lollies or chocolates.

• Pre-open packaging or pack snacks unwrapped. It's a huge help for the teacher, who is often reading a story to the class during this time.

Thanks for your continued support! It's wonderful to see the children learning and growing every day.

Ngā mihi mahana ki a koutou,

Niquita, Stacey, Katie and Elizabeth

Kia ora e te whānau,

Welcome to Week 4 of the third term! 

We would like to extend a very warm welcome to Poppy Wallace-Bell. Poppy is with us for the final 7 week placement of her teacher training at the University of Canterbury. Please introduce yourselves to Poppy and help to make her feel at home with us here at Beckenham Te Kura o Pūroto.

There is so much wonderful learning taking place within our hub, including a focus on Calendar Art, a Digitech topic starting next week, amazing learning in Maths (including 2D and 3D shapes, repeated addition leading on to multiplication, skip counting forwards and backwards in 2s, 5s and 10s and learning the doubles, e.g., 3+3, 7+7, etc., all the way up to 10+10) and of course, our Structured Literacy group learning. Your children are fantastic learners and we're all very proud of them!

Eight of our Koru team members are going to be moving through to the Kahikatea team on Monday next week. We wish them all the very best and will miss them enormously. We know that as long as they continue to be guided by our Beckenham Values they are going to prove to the new Kahikatea team members that they are wonderful learners and loyal friends.

Maths Week Next Week!

To celebrate Maths Week, we will be having a daily joke and maths problem on a whiteboard, outside Hangere, for you and your child to solve! Come to school each day with plenty of time to spend with your child mulling over the joke and solving the problem together.

Mathematics & Statistics: Understanding your child's learning

The Ministry of Education's Parent Portal is a collection of resources for parents, families and carers. Here, you will find information about the learning your child is engaging in at school, within their year level, and how you can support them at home with their learning. Feel free to have a look and explore what you can do at home to support your child's Maths learning, while, at the same time, keeping it fun!

KOS:

Keeping Ourselves Safe

The Koru team will be participating in the Keeping Ourselves Safe programme during Weeks 6 and 7 of this term. Your child's homegroup teacher will teach six sessions and Constable Meg will teach two sessions.

What will children learn?

They will learn:

- to work out when their safety is at risk

- how to keep safe when they meet and mix with other people

- who and how to ask for help if they, or someone they know, is being abused

- to go on asking for help until someone does something to stop the abuse

- that it is important to make and follow personal, family, and school safety rules

Children will have some short activities to work through at home with you. Thank you for your support with this. Please click on this link for more information about Keeping Ourselves Safe.

Beckenham's Got Talent:

The Student Council members are organising a Beckenham's Got Talent event this term. If your tamariki are keen to sing, dance, play an instrument, perform some magic, drama or poetry, please sign them up by emailing your child's teacher. The maximum group size is eight people and the maximum performance time is four minutes. Auditions for the final event are in Week 8.

If your child wishes to audition for our school talent show, whānau are welcome to organise this with their child and/or a group of children. Any practices will need to take place at home after school. 

Structured Literacy:

Here are a few little video links below (some of which have been shared before, and are now being reshared for new families):

• The Sounds of New Zealand English

One of our teachers has recorded some videos to support our whānau with understanding what our literacy stages look like and what you can do to support your learner at home:

• Stage 1 & How to Help at Home
• Stage 2 
• Stage 3
• Stage 4
• Stage 4+

We hope you find these videos both informative and helpful as you support your child's learning at home!

And now for this fortnight's photo gallery:

Showing 'We Care', by helping with some planting in the Pūkaki play space.

Preparing the roots of this little tree for planting.

Wow - awesome building skills on display here!

More care and kindness being shown towards the environment.

Caring for this newly planted tree.

'We Get There Together'.

Wonderful teamwork, tamariki.

Inquiring into why our shadows change at different times throughout the day.

Making the link between repeated addition and multiplication.

...and learning that the multiplication sign 'x' means 'groups of'.

Beautifully formed letters at handwriting time.

Making the link between knowing the doubles and therefore knowing the two times table.

We know that a sentence starts with a capital letter, has spaces between the words and (mostly) ends with a full stop.

Learning about 2D shapes and their properties.

A hexagon...

A trapezium...

A parallelogram...

A triangle...

A pentagon...

A rhombus...

Showing 'We Get There Together' and 'We Care'.

More lovely teamwork.

Good friends working together on their project in the sandpit.

What a wonderful thing to do together in the warm sunshine - don't you just love a good book!

The audience grows...

Happy times with our Koru team friends!

Ngā mihi mahana ki a koutou,

Katie, Stacey, Niquita and Elizabeth

 Kia ora e te Whānau,

Welcome to Term 3! We have loved hearing about everyone's break over the holidays, and it has been wonderful to welcome some new children to our Koru team.

Kōmanawa

Kōmanawa is the building that has been renovated and our Koru team will be using, along with Hangere, for the rest of the year. It has been an exciting time for the children to explore and learn in this wonderful space. At this stage, Elizabeth/Stacey's Home Group will have their morning mat time and finish the day in Kōmanawa. It will be used by Katie for her Literacy Groups and as a space for Maths lessons for Elizabeth/Stacey's Home Group. 

Elizabeth and Stacey's Home Group will continue to put their bags in the blue cubbies and literacy folders in the usual spot inside Hangere, however, they will now put their lunch boxes and drink bottles in Kōmanawa before school. We thank you for your support with new routines as our team grows!

Term 3 

We are beginning the term with learning about Science and the changes we notice in our weather. There have been wonderful discussions about the different clothes we wear, how our shadows moves, what the trees look like, what we see and feel on frosty mornings during winter. 

We will be getting creative through Visual Art when we create some masterpieces for our Calendar Art PTA fundraising (more information will come around the fundraising and how you can support our school). Later in the term, we get to use our Beebots in Technology to create maps and programmes to get them to change directions and go where we want them to go.

Reminders:

• Literacy folders need to come back to school every day! If a child does not have their folder at school, they are unable to take a book home. 

• Library books are returned, and new books can be issued every Friday at school.

• Kiss and Drop: As the number of children in our Koru Team grows, our hub can feel a little overwhelming for some tamariki in the morning. Pleas aim to "kiss and drop" your child off at the door, rather than entering the hub with them. This will help set your children up for a calm, quiet, and successful transition in the morning. Thank you so much for your support with this!

• School car park: please use the gates on Eastern Tce and Sandwich Road to enter the school. We should not have any adults or children walking through the Staff/Ferndale car park as it can be busy before and after school.

• Lunch boxes: please ensure your child is only bringing water to school in their drink bottle (no juice or other drinks). It is important to help teach your child how to open and close their lunch boxes, so they can do this independently at the start and end of eating times. It would also be amazing if you could either pre-cut or teach your child how to open packets in their lunchboxes (for exampe: twisty yogurt pouches, potato sticks, chip bags, muselie bars etc.) Thank you for your help in this.

• Boxes: please save any boxes from cereals or museli bars etc, you might normally put out in your recylcing bin and send them into school instead - the children are loving creating and decoratin in the Maker Space in Hangere. We'd alos love any little bits and bobs such as ribbon, lace, buttons, feathers etc. for decorative purposes. Many thanks if you're able to help out with any of these items.

Kia ora e te whānau,

It has been a fun fortnight in the Koru team, with our first-ever school trip and Matariki evening.

We had a great time travelling on the bus into the city to visit the Christchurch Art Gallery on Monday. The children did an amazing job at showing 'We Care' and 'We Get There Together' by staying together as a group, listening carefully, and participating in the activities. 

On arrival, we met with the educator, who explained that we would be visiting an exhibition and then have the opportunity to create our own artworks.

Fred Graham: Toi Whakaata / Reflections: We were very fortunate to be shown around the Fred Graham exhibition. Tamariki were able to make connections between Māori myths and legends and Fred Graham's sculptures and relief works. We looked for shapes and patterns within each artwork, and children had a chance to draw the shapes and patterns that they could see.

Back in the Art Gallery classroom, children had a great time drawing shapes and koru patterns onto folded paper, which, once folded out, created really effective designs.

Matariki Evening

It was wonderful to have the opportunity to come together as a school community to acknowledge Matariki. 

Here is a song that we have been singing to help us learn the nine stars of Matariki.

Bee-Bots

Recently, children in the Koru team have been introduced to basic coding concepts as part of our maths learning, as well as during Learning Through Play. The Bee-Bots are programmable floor robots that help children learn about sequencing, directional language, and algorithms.  

Cybersafety

Staying Safe Online: Bullying

One in five young people in New Zealand have been the target of online bullying – it can happen to anyone, and it

can be hard for parents and whānau to deal with. Beckenham Te Kura o Pūroto takes online bullying seriously and

would encourage you to chat to your tamariki’s teacher if you have any concerns about online bullying.

Visit Netsafe’s Online Bullying Advice for Parents to read more.

Wishing you all a happy, safe and relaxing long weekend.

The Koru team

katie.mcfarlane@beckenham.school.nz

elizabeth.drummond@beckenham.school.nz

niquita.dalley@beckenham.school.nz

stacey.mclachlan@beckenham.school.nz

Kia ora e te whānau,

A warm welcome to this fortnight’s Koru Team blog post. Although it’s been a quieter couple of weeks in terms of events, our tamariki have been busy with rich learning across all areas of the curriculum. It has been lovely to see their growing independence and engagement throughout all the activities and classroom routines.

Pathways, Direction, and Matariki – Our Maths Learning
As a start to our learning about Matariki, we shared the story Little Kiwi’s Matariki, which you can watch again at home here:
👉 Little Kiwi’s Matariki - YouTube

This story inspired some wonderful cross-curricular learning. We created Matariki stars through art and craft, and used directional language (such as forward, turn left, turn right) to help Little Kiwi find the stars. We also used Bee Bots to practise our coding skills by programming them to follow a pathway towards the Matariki star cluster. This learning has supported our development of spatial awareness, early coding, and mathematical language, all while celebrating the Māori New Year.

Kiss and Drop:
As the number of children in our Koru Team grows, our hub can feel a little overwhelming for some tamariki in the morning. Please aim to "kiss and drop" your child off at the door, rather than entering the hub with them. This will help set your children up for a calm, quiet, and successful transition in the morning. Thank you so much for your support with this!

Learning Conferences – Tuesday 10th & Wednesday 11th June
Our Learning Conferences are happening next week on Tuesday and Wednesday (June 10 & 11). Please note that school will finish early on both days at 1:00pm. Supervision will be available until 3pm for a small group of children who are unable to be collected at 1pm.

We need EVERY FAMILY to fill in this form (click here) to let us know your plans for your child(ren) on Tuesday 10th and Wednesday 11th June. This includes letting us know if you need your child supervised at school on one or both of the Learning Conference days from 1:00-3pm.

These conferences are a great opportunity to celebrate your child’s progress and talk about next steps in their learning journey.

If you haven’t yet made a booking, please do so as soon as possible:

https://www.schoolinterviews.co.nz/code - use the code: r3wt9

Literacy Folders:
Please continue to send Literacy folders to school each day, and remind your child to unpack them into their group’s box each morning. These folders contain important learning materials used during our Literacy lessons. Thank you for your support in keeping this routine running smoothly.

Matariki Evening – Tuesday 17th June at 5pm - 7pm
We are looking forward to celebrating the Māori New Year with our school community at our upcoming Matariki Evening!
📅 Tuesday 17th June | 5:00–7:00pm

Here’s what to expect:
✨ Welcome in the hall at 5:00pm
✨ Kapa Haka performances
✨ Workshops and activities throughout the evening
✨ PTA Sausage Sizzle – please bring a koha (donation)

It will be a special evening of culture, community, and celebration. We hope to see you there!

We wish you a restful weekend and look forward to another fun and engaging fortnight ahead.

Ngā mihi mahana ki a koutou,
Niquita, Stacey, Katie and Elizabeth

niquita.dalley@beckenham.school.nz

stacey.mclachlan@beckenham.school.nz

katie.mcfarlane@beckenham.school.nz

elizabeth.drummond@beckenham.school.nz