Category Archives: Kahikatea

Kahikatea Newsletter Week 1 Term 2

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 Welcome Back Everyone! 

We hope you have had time to relax with your child/children over the school break. There are some important events and activities coming up this term including: 

School Cross Country ( Tuesday May 11th) 

Visit to the Botanic Gardens (May 24th & 25th) 

Staff Only Day ( Friday May 21st and Tuesday 8th June) 


Autumn/Winter Term

As the weather begins to change we invite you to please send you child to school with a named school jersey. Your child/ren are not required to bring their school sunhat during Term 2 and 3. 

If you wish to send a pair of warm socks or slippers to school for your child to wear inside please ensure these items are clearly named. 

Raincoats/Jackets/Gumboots need to be clearly named also. 


Cross Country Practices 

Teachers will be taking their homegroups out to the big field each afternoon to practice running the cross country course. Year 1 and 2 students will run a single lap of the Beckenham Park. 

Please send your child to school each day in footwear appropriate for running. Thanks! 


Visit to the Botanic Gardens 

We still need adult helpers for our trip to the gardens in late May. If you are able to support Amber or Charlotte's homegroups (Monday 24th May) OR Katie or Lisa's homegroup (Tuesday 25th May) please email charlotte.verity@beckenham.school.nz 

Communication with teachers

Teachers are in meetings daily from 8.15am to 8.30am and again from 3.15pm three to four times a week. 

If you need to make a time to meet with you child's homegroup teacher please email them. 

It is so nice to see everyone! Here are some first day back photos...

















Kahikatea Team Newsletter TERM 1 Week 11

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Cross Country

Our whole school cross country is coming up at the start of next term. This will be held on Tuesday the 11th of May in the afternoon. 
Child/ren will run in Year Groups.
Kahikatea is made up of Year 1 and Year 2 students. Some of our Koru students will run with our Year 1s. 
Seniors will have an earlier lunch and start first. The Junior students will start later in the afternoon. Timings will be confirmed during Week 1 of the Term 2 and sent out to you via the school newsletter. 

We encourage all the students to embrace our school value "We Love Challenge" and to try their very best. While for the majority this will be participating as a runner, there will be additional ways to make sure all our tamariki are involved in the event. 
Teams have started our practices already and will continue during the first week of Term 2. We know that some children will enjoy practicing over the holidays. Happy running!


Upcoming Excursion to Hagley Park & the Museum


Team Kahikatea will enjoy a fantastic excursion to Hagley Park to undertake a 'Park Explorers' Programme with the Council's Learning in Action Team, as well as a visit to the Museum to learn about Canterbury's history within the 'Christchurch Street' area. 

Our learning focuses are: 
* change in our local community 
* change in nature 
* life processes in nature
* biodiversity  
* scientific skills: observation, categorising, describing
* working together, communicating ideas and reflecting on our growing knowledge

We would love to start organising parent helpers for this event. Amber's and Charlotte's home groups will take the excursion on Mon 24/5/21, and Katie’s and Lisa’s groups will go on Tues 25/5/21. The trip will take a full day. 

If you would like to be a parent helper, please email Charlotte on charlotte.verity@beckenham.school.nz with your name, phone number, and your child's name. Note: unfortunately, younger siblings cannot come.


Handwriting & How You Can Help Your Child

The first start of our handwriting programme, Kinetic Letters (TM) is making bodies stronger. We work on strengthening different areas of our body, which supports our ability to write clearly and easily. Here are some the activities we do to strengthen each part of our body, and you might try practicing at home: 
* Pelvic Girdle: crawling, jumping, hopping, climbing 
* Shoulder Girdle: plank, chair or floor push-ups, pull-ups (e.g. on jungle gym or bars)
* Forearm and Wrist: practice the pencil grip, pegging, blocks, playdough, making (construction), finger action rhymes
* Positions for handwriting: practice sitting properly with back on chair, and legs under table; sitting crossed legged with straight backs
See teachers if you would like more ideas. 

Wellbeing 

We have started learning about emotions and feelings over the last fortnight. 
We have discussed how emotions can change our facial expressions, practised showing, describing and naming different emotions. Simply by naming emotions, we can help ourselves to manage them. 
Children watched and talked about this video (you might like to watch at home) and we made our feelings monsters.




ESOL Learning 

Our ESOL students have been working on giving directions, location language and prepositions, by playing games and giving directions 
to peers during their classes with Jeanette. Key terms we have discussed include: first, last, after, next, up, down, under, on, beside, inside, 
underneath and behind. 
Students have also shared aspects of their own cultures, which we have collated into a display in our hub:


 
Thank you for all your support this term and for making time to meet us for learning conferences in Week 11. We wish you all a very safe and happy holiday! 


Amber, Charlotte, Lisa & Katie 




Kahikatea Newsletter Term 1 Week 9 2021

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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/

“Use a variety of words to talk about the pictures

This means stay away from nouns (naming objects) and talk about words that describe (rough), action words (jump), locations (under) and words about time (later)

Highlight important words

Stress the important words or new vocabulary by changing your voice (make your pitch go up or down, change the rate of your speech by talking faster or slower)

Build on your child’s understanding

A great way to help your child understand is to relate it to a similar experience in his or her life. This will help them build a better connection between the book and something that has happened to him or her in the past.

Think outside the book

Encourage your child to think beyond the pages of the book to expand his or her thinking. You can help your child predict what might happen next, compare and contrast an object from the story to real life, make an inference and draw a conclusion, identify a problem and solution and sequence the events of the story by retelling what happened. These discussions will help your child to think, solve problems and imagine.”


Here are some photos from our literacy lessons and our library time: 
















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.






Have a fabulous Easter break, and we look forward to seeing you back at school on Wednesday 7th April.


Team Kahikatea

(Lisa, Katie, Amber, Charlotte, Michelle, Kate and Paul)







































Home Learning and our Structured Literacy Workshop

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Kia ora whānau,

You will notice that there are some literacy Home Learning resources in your child's reading folder this week. These resources are to support what they are learning in their structured literacy lessons. More alphabet letters and resources, such as heart words will be added. 

If you have queries about the structured literacy programme or are interested to hear more about it, please join us for the workshop detailed below.

The Structured Literacy Approach: Parents and Caregivers workshop - understanding how our children learn to read.

Join us in the staffroom at 3.15 pm or 7:00pm on Tuesday 30th March 2021.

Caroline Morritt, our Resource Teacher of Literacy will explain this approach to teaching reading and writing. Based on the Science of Reading, Beckenham Te Kura o Pūroto uses an explicit, systematic structured literacy approach to build a strong literacy foundation.

Decodable books support targeted classroom teaching of phonological awareness and blending and segmenting skills for accurate, automatic reading and spelling. 


Team Kahikatea (Lisa, Charlotte, Amber & Katie) 

Kahikatea Newsletter Term 1 Week 7

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It has been another busy fortnight in Team Kahikatea! Please enjoy reading and viewing what recent highlights below. 

Wellbeing 

Over the past fortnight, we have been learning about how to make friends, communication skills and conflict resolution. Our focus has been on using our words to.... 

* ask someone new to play 
* tell someone else if there is a problem 
* ask peers (as well as the teacher) if we need help or are unsure where to put our things or what to do

Structured Literacy 

We have started our structured literacy lessons this week. Students work in targeted groups with their literacy teacher, and cover phonics, reading, spelling and writing. Each child has been assessed and is working at their specific point of need. When they are not with the teacher, the students enjoy oral language, rhyming and word building games and practise working co-operatively (photos below!). 

Literacy: How can you help your child at home?

The emphasis in teaching spelling is to focus on the sound, not the letter name. Making the phoneme (sound) - grapheme (letter shape) connection is the first step in literacy learning.

Ensure that your child is saying the ‘pure’ sound without an ‘uh’ sound on the end, for example, ‘lllll’ rather than ‘luh’ for the L sound. Please refer to this clip, The Sounds of New Zealand English for more information on the sound that matches each of the letters. Feel free to practise letter sounds and blends at home (cards will be sent home soon), as well as the Heart Words (learn to read and write). 

You may like to play games like: 

  • Speed Sounds: your child can look at each letter card and say the sound it represents. See if your child can do this at speed.
  • ‘I Spy’: You can play games such as ‘I Spy’, using the letter sound (not the name).
  • Stepping Stones: Place the cards on the floor with the letter facing up, as if they are stepping stones across the river. Explain to your child that they have to cross the ‘river’ without falling in the water. Your child steps on each card and says the corresponding sound.
  • Fish or Memory: You could make up a matching set of letter cards, and use both sets to play Fish or Memory together, by placing both sets of cards face down on the table or floor. Each player has to be able to say the sound, if they are to keep a matching pair of cards.
  • Reading aloud to your child/ren continues to be hugely valuable and important for their literacy development. Click to read further information on the importance of reading at home can be read here.

Clapping the Syllables Game 


Rhyming Activities 
CVC word writing




Kinetic Letters Handwriting Program

Discovery Photos 







Evaporation Experiment