Kia ora,
Can you believe we have just finished Week 9 of the term and only have one more week until the July winter break starts. I'm sure everyone will be looking forward to some relaxing family time over the break.
This week in the Koru team we have been learning about Matariki. The children have been busy engaging in some Matariki activities and learning about the 9 Matariki stars. It was great to see many of our children and their whanau gathering for our Rōpū Hui on Wednesday night to celebrate Matariki. We hope you enjoyed your night participating in the fun range of activities available.
We have been enjoying hearing about all the practise children are involved in with their Structured Literacy at home. Thank you so much for your support with this, it is making a huge difference to their progress throughout the stages. Just a reminder that children who are just starting their Structured Literacy journey 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. 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.
In our maths programme over the past week we have been using frogs and ponds to create number sentences. We started with 5 frogs, and increased the numbers during the week, and looked at how many different ways the frogs could be in and out of the pond and recorded our findings.
In Kōmanawa we have been enjoying exploring the different equipment and activities on offer during Learning Through Play.
The lego has been very popular.
We loved seeing this team work together to create this construction.
The playdough table has also been very busy.
We love how our 'golden oldies' help to settle our new students in.
The puppy school still has lots of puppy students.
Well done to those children who participated in the fun run on Friday to support the student council in raising funds for the charity KidsCan. You all put in an incredible amount of energy! Ka pai!
We hope you have all had a relaxing and fun weekend with your tamariki.
Ngā mihi mahana ki a koutou,
Elizabeth, Jo, Stacey, Chelsea, Tracey and Nicola
