Koru Team Term 2 Week 3

Kia ora, e te whanau,

We hope this finds you and your family all happy and healthy at home. We have had a busy first 3 weeks of Term 2 and all our newbies are settling in so well! We love seeing all their smiling faces at drop off time and enjoy seeing them cheerily say their goodbyes. We appreciate your support in helping your child become independent at carrying their own school bag and unpacking their bag when they arrive at school each morning.

Structured Literacy:

We have been enjoying hearing about all the practice 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 with the children's progress through the Structured Literacy 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. A word about 'heart words': these are words that cannot be sounded out, simply need to be learned 'by heart' and will also start coming home for children to practise reading and writing with you at home. Once children are proficient in segmenting and blending the first 8 sounds together, and know the first five 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 children's success at decoding words, so this stage of learning may take longer for some learners. It is very exciting to see the children's 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 practice with this within our lessons. This would be a great home learning activity once children are secure in the sounds they are bringing home.

Please make sure your child brings back their folder, with their sound pack and books inside, to school every day, as these are used in the Structured Literacy lessons. The sound packs are also added to as the children learn new sounds and heart words.

Identifying the correct letter for a sound given, using our cute character cards.

Practising writing, then reading their sounds...

then writing a dictated sentence.

Playing 'Jump' with some of the Stage 1 letter sounds: "Jump on the letter that makes the /m/ sound."

Forming 'consonant, vowel, consonant' words: beginning sound...

middle sound...

...and final sound

...then segmenting and blending to read

Covering up and segmenting to spell and write: beginning sound...

middle sound...

and final sound. 

We have been working hard in our maths sessions to solve problems.

Our Learning Through Play topic for this fortnight is 'Construction'. The children have been exploring a variety of equipment for use in their constructions. 

Using shapes

Experimenting with balancing and stacking cardboard tubes

Wow, what a tall tower!!

...and, crash!

Demonstrating 'We Get There Together' to build towers...

and more towers...

constructing puzzles together...

and building mini worlds using blocks and animals.....

and using the duplo.

Last Friday we were lucky to have some Kauri students (Years 7 and 8) help set up a fun obstacle course for us outside.

We had to balance over the seesaw then roly poly on the mat...

and zig zag in and out of the cones.

...and, of couse, we just LOVE Kate coming to teach coding in Digitech each week!

We are very excited to have our Junior Park Explorers outing coming up. Please see this post that was sent out on Tuesday for more information. If you are able to be one of our parent helpers, please email your child's Home Group teacher. We are still needing some more parent helpers for each outing.

Elizabeth's and Nicola's Home Groups' outing is on Monday 30th May 9.30 - 11.45 a.m.

Georgia's Home Group's outing is on Tuesday 31st May 9.30 - 11.45 a.m.

We hope you have a lovely weekend together.

Ngā mihi mahana ki a koutou,

The Koru Teachers: Elizabeth, Georgia, Nicola, Stacey, Jeanette and Amy.