Koru Team News 2026

Term 1, Week 4

This week we began our literacy group sessions. You may have heard your children talk about the yellow jelly bean table! This is where our literacy groups take place. At Beckenham Te Kura o Pūroto we follow a Structured Literacy approach to reading. Your children will be bringing home a few letter sounds to practise at home and these will be added to as they progress. These can be used to practise the pure sounds the letters make and then can be blended together to form words. Your child could practice writing them as well as saying the pure sounds each letter makes. Heart words, these are words that cannot be sounded out, will also start coming home for children to practise. Once they are proficient in segmenting and blending the first 8 sounds together, and know the heart words, they will start bringing home decodable books to read with you at home. The ability to segment and blend sounds together is paramount to their success at decoding words, so this stage may take longer for some learners. It is exciting to see their progress take off once they have accomplished this skill. The next step is for the learner to be able to write the sounds they hear in words and we do lots of practise with this within our lessons. This would be a great home learning activity once they are secure in the sounds they are bringing home.

Evacuation Drill

Each term we have a schoolwide practice drill on a different type of emergency situation. On Wednesday morning we had a practice fire evacuation drill. We talked about it a lot and even had our own mini practice the day before. The children were amazing during the drill, so calm and listened so well. We were very impressed.

Whare Kotahitanga

On Wednesday we had our first Whare Kotahitanga event. It was lots of fun! Whare Kotahitanga is a refreshed house programme focused on connection, belonging, and unity rather than competition. It is being run on Wednesday afternoons for the next 3 weeks. During the sessions each house is taking part in a different activity. Over the 4 week programme each house will rotate around the 4 different activities. Ask your little house member what the activity for their house was this week.

Photos from Learning Through Play

Photos from one of our Maths lessons this week - How many puppies are in the basket and how many are out of the basket? Can you write the equation?

Reminders

• Hats are needed each day at school for terms 1 & 2
• Our library day is Friday so books need to be brought back to school before Friday
• Poetry books go home on a Friday and can come back any day before the next Friday
• House tee shirts can be worn on the next 3 Wednesdays - these are optional uniform items and can be purchased from the school office.
• There has been quite a lot of sickness across the school, if your child is unwell please keep them home to prevent spreading bugs.