Koru Week 7, with a focus on Structured Literacy

Kia ora e te whanau,

We hope everything's going well for you all on the home front. We have reached the end of Week 7, and it has been a fun-filled and epic fortnight here in the Koru hub.

Here is the Learning At Home page link for those of you who might be needing it. We are adding and updating our content every so often, however you will see that there are enormous possibilities here on our Koru page. If your child completes some Learning Through Play, some Literacy activities and some Maths activities each day, then that is terrific. If, on some days, this isn't achievable for any reason, then that is absolutely fine too. You will see that in class, we start each day with our karakia, followed by the National Anthem, and this might be a good thing to do at home as well.

Today you will see that the children have brought home, in their bags, their unique Home Learning codes which will give you access to Seesaw. We will be using Seesaw for those of you who are engaging in Learning From Home.

Structured Literacy: Across the school and within our Koru hub, we use the Structured Literacy approach to teaching reading. This approach focuses on speech sounds first, then leads on to the writing and reading of these sounds in words. As our tamariki learn different sounds, they then learn to blend and segment these sounds to read and write words. We also follow another specific approach for our handwriting which is called 'Kinetic Letters', and these handwriting skills are also practised during Literacy lessons.

Scope and Sequence: There are 7 different stages within the Structured Literacy approach. Each stage has new sounds for the children to learn and requires different skill sets. As children move through the stages, new skills are learnt and these build upon previous skills that the children have learnt.

We love practising our letter sounds at home with our families.

We can make words using our letter cards, to practise our segmenting and blending skills.
 
We can use our sounds and heart words to write a sentence.

Well done! Great work at writing a sentence independently.

Reading books: With Structured Literacy, there is a great series of books that goes along with this approach to support the children with their learning. In order to read the books, our tamariki must know most of the first 8 letter sounds. They will have been practising the skills of segmenting and blending sounds to encode and decode words, which then leads to the children being given a book.

Little Learners Love Literacy: This website, “Why LLLL (Little Learners Love Literacy)? has additional information as to why we use the Little Learners Love Literacy programme.


The above video explains how to clearly and correctly pronounce each of the letter sounds and will help you support your children as they practise these with you at home.


This little video clip focuses on phonological awareness. Watch how Linda Farrell gives Autumn explicit practice in blending, segmenting, and manipulating the sounds in words.

Caroline Moffatt's Structured Literacy Parent talk: Last year, Caroline Moffatt, our Resource Teacher of Literacy, led a workshop for parents, devoted to the Structured Literacy approach to teaching reading and writing. This contains valuable information related to the Science of Reading and our approach towards Literacy here at Beckenham Te Kura o Pūroto.


Here is a link to all our information regarding our Structured Literacy approach which you will find on our school website: https://www.beckenham.school.nz/index.php/learning/literacy-learning

We do hope you all have a restful and very happy weekend, everyone. We're looking forward to seeing those bright and happy wee faces next week!

Ngā mihi mahana koutou,
Elizabeth, Georgia and Stacey

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