Kia ora Whānau

Thank you for all of your help and support over the term.

He waka eke noa - this is a canoe we are all in together, and we only keeping it moving by paddling together!

South Library Trip
We had a fantastic time exploring innovation and technology at South Library. We used Beebots, Scratch, undertook a library tour and saw a 3D printer operating! Scratch is a free app. It will be key in helping our students learn early programming skills, in line with the new Digital Literacy curriculum. 

Look at these little readers!

Look what you can make with a 3D printer! Wow!

Watching the magic

Bee Bot Fun

Scratch Junior

Scratch Junior

Keep NZ Beautiful Week
We have picked up rubbish galore this week! We know that the rubbish in our local environment can easily blow into rivers and gutters, and out to sea. We encourage everyone in our community to make a difference by picking up the rubbish they see (even if it wasn't theirs!).

Mental Health Week
We learnt more about Te Whare Tapa Whā and the four (now five!) areas of wellbeing. See here for useful information and lots of ideas for working on your own wellbeing at home. 







Connecting with Community
Holidays are a perfect time for connecting with each other, and your local community. Some options: 
* The CCC Libraries have a number of interesting events and workshops for children.
* The Breeze Walking Festival includes free walks....check out the Gruffalo Exploration!
* Local planting and clean-up days are advertised on the Canterbury Enviro Calendar.

' We are proud to have students who have given up talent show to march in the Climate Change Rally. Here are one family, getting ready to set off.

Our Korero Corner this week.

Games, books and activities

Can you recognize these shapes? Can you name them in Maori? Can you name the parts of your tinana (body)?

We are currently working with our Resource Teacher of Literacy to best target the reading needs of a number of our students. Through observations, we have noticed that some of our readers have not yet made the firm connection between letters and sounds (the alphabetic code).
This is an essential skill for learning to read. We are therefore strongly focusing on letter-sound relationships during reading lessons with some of our children who need it. In order to reinforce the connection we are using decodable texts. Almost every word in these books can be sounded out if unknown. As the books are not rich in vocabulary or sentence structure, it would be very beneficial if you could read to your child to continue to expose them to age appropriate language.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask.
Other games and activities that would help your child make letter-sound connections are: 
I-Spy (using the letter sound and the letter name)
Snap or Memory using the words from the books on small cards
Play 'name 3 things' that start with/end with...
Our glue stick supply is running very low. If you have a glue stick at home please send to school for our tamariki to use. These will be gratefully received!
We have been super impressed by the amazing performances by our tamariki. Look at these gorgeous kids...

Kia ora Whanau,

Over the last 3 weeks Lisa and Amber have been running practices for students who are interested in being in the Talent Show. These have been during lunchtime and some afternoons.

This week we have 2 lunchtime rehearsals scheduled: in the hall on Monday and again on Friday. If your child has a costume, please send it to school with them on Friday.

By the end of this week Lisa and Amber need to select 3 (groups and/or individuals) to perform at the school Talent Show on Friday 27 September 1.40 to 2.45pm.

Kind thanks for all your support and inquiries regarding this event. If you have any further questions, please get in contact with Amber or Lisa.

amber.donovan@beckenham.school.nz
lisa.griffith@beckenham.school.nz

Arohanui,
Team Kahikatea.

Parenting Week

Toys

Book week Dress up

PTA Readathon

Keeping Ourselves Safe

Sydenham Cricket Club

Talent Show

Discovery
Discovery is still proving to be very popular with the children as they get to explore various activities and use their wonderful imaginations. The children love to dress up and act out scenes and they also love to develop their artistic skills creating ferocious monsters or sketching their favourite cartoon. Here are some pictures of some of the children working collaboratively to create a Duplo, wooden block, train track extravaganza. They spent a long time working on this and what an amazing creation they ended up with!



Reading
Next week, teachers will be completing Running Records with your children so we can gather up-to-date information on their progress in reading. This means that there will be no guided reading lessons and your children will be taking home books from their browsing boxes. Please do make sure you are reading with your child every night as it is really making a difference! Thank you so much for your ongoing support with this.

Readathon
The readathon starts today! Your child will have brought home a Readathon form to fill. Please feel free to discuss a goal with your child which will be manageable for them but also set a bit of a challenge. Then you can collect some sponsors who can support your reading quest and help to raise money for the PTA. Go on, you can do it!



Talent Show
Rehearsals for the Talent Show will be up and running next week. The children are extremely excited about it and have lots of fantastic ideas about what to do. We will give them a chance to rehearse during lunchtimes and it would be great if you could support your children at home too.  The act or performance is to last no longer than 3 minutes. The Talent Show finals will be in Week 10 and we will update you on this nearer to the time.


Heavy Work
We have recently introduced a new programme which involves doing 'heavy work' with those children who are proprioceptive. This means they have more difficulty in sensing the position, location, orientation and movement of their body and its parts. A way to help these children is to get them to do heavy work like pushing up against a wall, moving the logs around on the grass and also using a weighted blanket which we have just acquired. It is a way for these children to regulate themselves and we are finding that it really works!



DMIC

The children are continuing to work really well on their Maths problem solving and they are solving some very tricky problems! We thought we would share a few of the problems we have been working on and you can try them out with your child at home. How many different ways can you solve these problems? Now there's a challenge!


Maddox, Luca, Thisev, Lily and Hayzel are Milk Monitors in this story. They had 100 cartons of milk. They gave lots of cartons out. There were 24 left. How many cartons did they give out?
The children were creating Kandinsky circle art.
Each child had 73 circles to colour in. On the first day, each child coloured in 27 circles. How many circles were there left to colour in?