Koru Team News Term 2 Week 7

Kia ora, e te whānau,

Welcome to our Week 7 news, and isn't it hard to believe that we're over half way through Term 2 now?! 

We're loving hearing your tamariki complement each other as they notice our school values being put into practice by their friends, throughout their days at school. We even hear gorgeous stories about this taking place at home too! Tino pai, tamariki - you're awesome! 

The children continue to put impressive effort into their learning across all curriculum areas. Our Literacy programme in the Koru team includes: small group reading and writing (individual letters, heart words, short words at their level, and then leading to short and gradually longer sentences), shared writing (whole class), handwriting, phonemic awareness, Narrative Intervention and a weekly library visit.

Some of the following links have been shared in previous posts, however they're well worth resharing, for new families as well as a reminder for the families of children who started in Term 1:

• The Sounds of New Zealand English
• How to Help at Home
• Stage 1 
• Stage 2 
• Stage 3 
• Stage 4 
• Stage 4+ 

Please click on the links above, which match the stage of reading at which your child is learning. They provide valuable tips and support for you at home.

Shared Writing teaches the children about the parts of a sentence and what a sentence needs (e.g., a capital letter to start and a full stop, or exclamation mark or question mark at the end, spaces between words, etc.). The children learn about the 'who' (subject), 'do' (verb) and 'what' (object) in a sentence.

Our handwriting programme was a focus in our most recent post.

Phonemic Awareness is the understanding that spoken words are made up of individual sounds. It doesn't involve print, just listening and responding. The children learn to isolate sounds, manipulate sounds, and blend and segment the sounds into spoken words.

Narrative Intervention teaches the children about the parts of a story, for example, the characters, the setting, the problem, the action and the solution (or, as the children like to describe it, 'the happy ending'!).

We love our library visits on Fridays! Thank you so much for ensuring that your child's library folder has been returned to school on or before each Friday. 

What’s coming up:

• Junior Park Explorers: June 18th (Hooray, and thank you so much to those of you who have offered to help. We really appreciate that!)
• Reports shared: June 19th
• Learning Conferences: June 23rd and 24th

Congratulations and thank you:

We would like to acknowledge our very own Izzy Sepie, who recently amazed us all by single-handedly raising a very large sum of money in response to Cade's request for support for those families who might be struggling to provide food, stationery and/or uniforms for their tamariki. Izzy's response to this request for help was to hold her very own bake stall, and all of the money she raised, she donated to the fund which the school holds to support these families.

Izzy, you're a superstar and we say, "Thank you!" Tino pai tou mahi.

Photo Gallery:

A plea: 

Bali's very new polar fleece (zip up the front) has been misplaced and we'd love to find it as soon as possible. Please double check that it's your own child's polar fleece that was brought home today, rather than Bali's by mistake. Many thanks for your help with that.

All the best for a wonderful weekend ahead :)

Ngā mihi mahana ki a koutou,

Stacey, Nicola, Kendall and Elizabeth

stacey.maclachlan@beckenham.school.nz

nicola.reddecliffe@beckenham.school.nz

kendall.skelton@beckenham.school.nz

elizabeth.drummond@beckenham.school.nz