Koru Team News: Term 4 Week 2 (25/10/2024)

Kia ora, e te whānau,

A very warm welcome back to our fourth and final term of the 2024 school year. We especially welcome the families of the new children to our Koru team: Atlas, Isabella, Oliver, Ruby, Remy and Johnny. They've all made a lovely, positive start to school. Well done, tamariki!

Routines:

All children have embraced our routines and have fallen back into the swing of things with impressive ease. Earlier in the year, the children helped to develop our Learning Through Play guidelines, as follows:

Use gentle hands and gentle feet
Treat everyone with kindness and care
Use quiet inside voices
Tidy as you go
Follow instructions quickly and quietly
Be part of the team at tidy up time
Don't tip everything out of a container, just take what you need (unless it's a jigsaw puzzle!).

These guidelines were the children's ideas and we revisited them at the start of this term, just as a reminder, and also so that our new children would be familiar with them.

Other routines, which the children have embraced once again, include: unpacking their bags when they arrive at school in the morning, including putting their Literacy folder in the right container; remembering their poetry books and library folders on Friday; lining up after break times; 'showing five' whenever they are sitting on the mat; and following the expectations in their small Literacy group lessons (sitting up, chair pulled in, focusing on the learning and 'whiteboards are for writing, not drawing').

Friendship list:

Georgia will, once again, be sending out an invitation to those of you who would like to have your details added to our Friendship List, so please keep an eye out for an email about this.

Term Overview:

We have a very busy term ahead of us. Some of the topics that we'll be focusing on include:

our school-wide focus areas (including How We Play, Moving Inside, Speaking and Listening and Tidying)
our Word of the Week continues (including Being an Upstander, Honesty, Inclusion, Showing Respect, Friendship and Determination, along with several other key values)
Life Education (with a focus on friendship - further details in the next Blog post)
Cyber Safety (and again with further details to come)

Athletics Day yesterday:

Thank you so much to those families who were able to come along and support the tamariki during their Athletics activities today. The children all did SO well and, at the same time, had a lot of fun! Congratulations to each and every child for the wonderful effort put in, and special congratulations to those who also ran in the house relay. Some of our wee ones even stepped up and ran in the relay, having only had a few days at school. Now that takes confidence! We have just a few photos from our Athletics Day, but will be able to post more in the future, so keep an eye out for them.

Here are a few photos from our first fortnight back at school: