Kia ora e te whānau,

Our huge highlight this week has been swimming! We are so proud of our tamariki showing our kete values, 'We Love Challenge' and 'We Love Learning'. They have also demonstrated our key competencies of 'managing self' and 'participating and contributing'. Each day the changing process has become faster and lost property is becoming slightly less!

The focus of our swimming lessons has been on safety in the water:

For some of our tamariki, swimming has been a new experience that was initially a little scary. A VERY exciting comment heard from one of our learners was: "Look at me, I'm doing bubbles in the water and it's only my third day in the pool!!"

Thanks again to our wonderful parent helpers, for supporting our learners at the pool.

Here are some photo highlights from the week:

Kia ora e te whānau,

We are lucky to have two University of Canterbury speech-language therapy students with us this term, Lilly and Sarah. They are on their final placement before joining the workforce! Lisa Collier is a registered Speech-Language Therapist (SLT) as well as a teacher, and will be supervising the students. 

Lilly and Sarah will be working with many of our Kahikatea learners over the course of the term, in varying capacities. If Lisa currently works with your learner, then it is likely the students will also be part of their learning programme.

Please see a brief introduction from Sarah and Lilly, below.

If you have any questions, please contact lisa.collier@beckenham.school.nz

Ngā mihi nui,

The Kahikatea Team

Sarah & Lilly

Kia ora everyone, 

I am Sarah a speech-language student in my fourth and final year of study. I am looking forward to working with Lisa, and meeting many learners during this experience. 

Before this placement, I have most recently had the opportunity to work with adults and children who have voice and fluency disorders, which allowed me to grow my knowledge and develop interest in areas that I did not have previously. 

I have great interest in working with children with complex needs; specifically, autism, and individuals requiring an AAC device. I look forward to the time that I will be spending at Beckenham Te Kura o Pūroto, and everything that I will learn and take away from this experience, which will allow me to grow as a speech-language therapist.

Ngā mihi,

Sarah Keppel

Kia ora e te whānau,

It has been a busy few weeks in Kahikatea! Reports went online at the end of Week 5, and we loved connecting with whānau at Learning Conferences in Week 6. There were a few questions during these conferences about accessing reports. Please let your home group teacher know if you need any support with this.

Transitions

Over the last couple of weeks we have started transition visits for our learners. We enjoyed participating in Learning Through Play with Kōwhai learners, in their hub, and we also connected with Koru learners, who visited us. Lots of laughs were had and connections made.

A Teddy Bear Picnic!

Eels

We were lucky to have some learners from Pōhutukawa, Rose and Ashlyn, visit us to teach us about eels. They spoke passionately about why eels are special, the different types and what we can do to help them. They also provided this video link if you want to hear more about eels. The learners all had a fun activity sheet to do afterwards.

Notices/ Reminders

We are now doing a stocktake of all of our books. This includes our structured literacy texts ('Pip and Tim' books) and school library books. Please return these as soon as possible with your learner. No more books will be coming home before the end of the year. Many thanks!

Book Character and Rainbow Diversity Day

Wow, what an amazing response to our dress up day. We loved the variety of characters and colours of clothing in the hub! Thank you for your donation to the Child Cancer Foundation and Qtopia.

We read books, and spoke about what we liked about different characters. Here are some comments:

"I love how Elsa has frozen powers."

"Army characters have tanks and save other people."

"Wonder Woman can shoot lasers out of her eyes!"

"Velociraptors are so smart they can open doors."

"Horses have buckles on their saddle"

"Spiderman can shoot out webs"

"The Highway Rat has a sword."

"Melvin can make cool inventions."

"I like being a Gruffalo because I am scary!"

"Tinkerbell has wings!"

Have a lovely weekend!

Ngā mihi nui,

The Kahikatea Team

Kia ora Kahikatea whānau,

Tomorrow the Readathon cards are coming home. For our learners who are within stage 1 to 6 of our Little Learners Love Literacy programme, we would not expect independent and fluent reading of extended texts. We would love to use this opportunity for our learners to engage passionately with books. This could include whānau reading library books to/ with their learner and focusing on the language comprehension strand of the ‘Reading Rope’ below:

Identifying and getting excited about new vocabulary is particularly beneficial and fun and can have a large impact on writing too.

Ngā mihi nui,

Kahikatea Team

Literacy in Kahikatea

It was awesome to see so many families at our structured literacy information sessions with Caroline Morritt (Resource Teacher for Literacy). If you were unable to attend, we hope to have a recording of the session available soon. Caroline reinforced the importance of comprehension, during these parent meetings, with reference to  'Scarborough’s Rope'

Reading with your child

This is always a great opportunity to focus on comprehension skills. Here are some great ideas from www.speechpathways.ca/2018/01/12/reading-with-your-child/

Team Hui 

Each week, we have a team hui. It is a special time, where we come together, connect and celebrate. As part of our hui, we say our karakia and waiata. We have noticed a number of our learners confidently reciting these off by heart, ka pai! We have attached these below, in case your child would like to practice at home.

Building Connections

This week we have been focusing on getting to know more about our peers. We have been connecting with a variety of people and finding out about our shared interests as well as our differences. It has been great to find out new things about each other and to practice our active listening skills.

Learning Conferences

Week 11 - Monday 12th April and Wednesday 14th April

School will close at 2pm on both days, to allow Learning Conferences to begin at 2:15pm.

Please go onto the School Interviews website and use the code kk64k to book your learning conference. The Learning Conferences are for 15mins each, except for Year 7/8 where you need to book a 15-minute slot, but allow 30 mins (it works!)

The focus of these Learning Conferences will be to update you on how your child has settled into the school year and the areas of focus they are working on in numeracy and literacy.