Welcome to Term 2 😃

It is wonderful to be able to welcome whanau into school grounds and for our school day to be returned to the usual 3pm. Thank you for continuing to follow our health and safety protocols and supporting your child/ren to do the same. We Get There Together!    

We are well into our learning programs and this week some children have a new literacy teacher. Please look in your child/childrens reading folder to find this HOME LEARNING notice: 

Kia ora e te Whānau,

Please find letter cards attached, for the stage your learner is working at in structured literacy. They can be cut up and put into the plastic bag and used at home. 

This is a copy of the Scope and Sequence your learner will be working through:

How can you help your child at home?

The emphasis in teaching spelling is to focus on the sound. 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’. Please refer to a Youtube clip, The Sounds of New Zealand English (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SePU-T4S-js) for more information on the sound that matches each of the letters.

In your pack, you will have the letters for the current level. It is helpful to look at the Scope and Sequence above to also revise what has been taught prior. 

Letter-Sound Connections

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.

Writing the letters: you say the sounds and your learner can write the letters. If they are not confident with this yet, let them copy the letter cards. They could write them on a whiteboard, on paper, or could even make their own flashcards.

‘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. As your child steps on each card they say 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.

Making words and non-words

Using the letters in the pack (and making cards for the letters taught prior), you can make CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant). For example in stage 1, you could make words such as ‘map’, ‘tip’, ‘sit’. If you learner is feeling confident with this, try making some ‘non-words’- e.g. ‘mip’. This can be done as a reading task where you make the word/ non-word, and they read it, or they can build the word with the letters as you say it (e.g. “make the word sit”, and they select the ‘s’, ‘i’, ‘t’ from the letter pack). After your learner has built the word, they can also write it.  From stage 5, you can also focus on words with two consonants at the beginning or end e.g. slip, tilt

Practise decoding

When the decodable story books start to come home, your child will have already practised reading each book several times at school. The aim is for your child to be very confident as they read each text to you at home. If your learner does hesitate at any particular word, you could encourage and support them to segment and then blend the sounds in the word to decode that word. They could then re-read the sentence from the beginning to ensure fluency as they read. 

If you would like to learn more about Structured Literacy or the Science of Reading (as it is also called), a good place to start is the Little Learners Love Literacy website, littlelearnersloveliteracy.com.au, under the tab ‘Why Little Learners Love Literacy’.

Have fun with your children, as they learn the letter sounds and how to blend and segment them!

Health and Well-being

We still need you to let us know if any of our children test positive during the holidays, please.

If your child tests positive, please email me (principal@beckenham.school.nz) with their name, and the date they either started symptoms or tested positive. We will be forwarding numbers to the Ministry of Education through the holidays. 

If your child/children need to isloate at home do take a look at our  Learning at Home Page . It is being updated for Term 2 and will have new themes and activiites to explore. 

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