Kia ora, e te whānau,

Koru Team: 

This year Elizabeth and Stacey are co-Team Leaders for the Koru team. We currently have two home groups, Elizabeth and Stacey share a home group and Georgia is the teacher of the other home group. You will see Elizabeth at school; Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. You will see Stacey at school; Monday, Tuesday and Friday. Sonya is the Teaching Assistant for our Koru team. You also might see Megan and Nicola teaching in Koru too.

Kia ora Whānau,

Athletics

Our Athletics Day on Monday was fantastic! The sun was shining, our tamariki were smiling, and it was so lovely to see the whole school out on the field showing, 'We Love Challenge' together by participating in all of the athletics events.

A massive 'thank you' to all the parents, caregivers, grandparents, whānau, and friends, who came to cheer on and support the children while they were participating in the athletics events. In our Koru team, the children got to have a go at running races, bean bag throw, high jump, and the gumboot throw.

It was wonderful to see the children demonstrating 'We Get There Together', by supporting and encouraging each other.



 We even got to sit and relax in the shade, at the end of the day, to support and cheer on the children, teachers, and parents in the sprint finals and House Team relays.


Ngā mihi mahana kia koutou
Elizabeth, Jo, Kristika, Noelene and Stacey

Kia ora koutou,
Welcome to Term 3

Bounce and Skip
Kinetic Letters is a handwriting program that teaches us about the formation of letters and numbers. There are four main threads: making bodies stronger, holding the pencil, learning the letters, and flow and fluency.


Holding the pencil
1. Point the pencil at my tummy
2. Pick it up with my Holding Fingers
3. Tip it back to lay across my hand and pop my Pillow Finger underneath


We do our Bounce and Skip handwriting lying on our tummies, resting our elbows with our legs out straight.





When the children learn to form letters, they hear stories about Brave Monkey and Scared Monkey who help them to know where to start their letters. We use special whiteboards to give the children a prompt to remember this.

The 'Jumper Family' all start with a down movement and then back up and over; r, p, n, and m begin at Scared Monkey, h and b begin at Brave Monkey.


The 'Abracadabra Family' all start with a 'c' shape before going 'up like a helicopter' and back down; c, o, a, g, q, and s begin at Scared Monkey, d goes 'up like a helicopter' to Brave Monkey.


Ngā mihi mahana,
Stacey, Kristika, Elizabeth and Jo

Welcome back to Term 2.
We are called the Koru Team. We are Year 0 and 1 children.

On Monday we had our school cross country fun run. The tamariki were amazing! There were lots of excited children who managed to finish their run with a smile on their face. A big thanks to everyone who came to watch and support our runners.

The children showed all our school values at the cross country:

We love learning - we were learning movement skills and about giving things a go.
We get there together - we cheer each other on and encourage everyone to do their best.
We care - we congratulated everyone not only the people who came first.
We love challenge - we kept trying even if it was tough
We make a difference - we chose a positive mindset. We did it!

Learning to read is lots of fun! Our reading programme includes reading to children, reading with children and reading by children.

It is wonderful that reading folders are coming to school every day and the children are doing a great job putting them in the correct group box before school. Having your reading folder at school every day also ensures children can read their books both at school and home. Rereading familiar texts provides children with reading 'mileage', and helps enormously in the development of fluency, phrasing and expression.

Our guided reading groups enjoy their books together most days. This provides opportunities for children to learn the skills of what good readers do, like learning to decode unknown words, learning letter sounds and blends, making predictions about what might happen next, having great discussions about the books and asking questions.

In writing, we start with shared writing. This is when we plan and construct writing together. The teacher models and talks through the process of constructing a text. The children contribute their own ideas throughout this process. This provides a supportive setting to model the process of writing, focus on letters, words, and letter-sound relationships, model strategies for checking and improving and demonstrate the use of a range of forms and structures in written language.

There are opportunities in a guided writing group for children to try writing independently, to learn to write high frequency words, and to play literacy games together.