Sharing our learning

Today during handwriting time Alex and Ollie were spotted sharing their learning with each other. It was great to hear them talking to each other about the size of the letters and checking that they were sitting on the line.

Ka pai Alex and Ollie! We love hearing what you think about your own learning!

St Patrick's Day - Rainbow Day Celebration

We celebrated St Patrick's Day as part of our team focus on celebrations from different cultures this year.  We have a great teacher aide, Mike, who works in our learning spaces.  He is from Ireland so we thought this would be a great day to celebrate with Mike.

We focused on the rainbows and the different colours that we can find in these.  We made chains with pots of gold at the bottom, bead strings for bracelets and necklaces, hand print shamrocks, clouds with rainbows hanging which we made into kites, and potato print rainbows.

We practiced a lot of skills doing these activities and found out a little bit more about Mike and the country he is from.  It was a lot of fun and we had a lot of time to develop our oral language with each other while completing some new activities.

Happy St Patrick's Day everyone!

Reading Must Do/Can Do time

We are learning how to stick at our reading activities to get the most out of them.  We had some great learners using our reading phones today.  These help the children to listen to themselves reading which is a big skill to learn.  This helps you to know when you have made a mistake and encourages the learner to go back and try again.  We love how many of these children are ones who have only recently started at school.  Ka pai Joseph, Phoenix, Kristina, Fatima, Bishwaditya, 

 Alex and Tom were also fantastic at making a story board out of our felt characters.  They were talking about where to place the pieces, what was going to happen in the story and negotiating with each other through this process.  What great skills you are both showing!

Reading Together

We have had a wonderful turn out for our Reading Together Programme this term.  Today our session included the children.  It was a busy time and much noisier than our usual sessions!  This is great as it shows the enthusiasm for reading in the group.  The leaners and their whanau enjoyed sharing some books together and we could hear many different languages being used.  

Talking about the pictures with your child is so important.  It helps them to have some ideas ready when they begin to try and read the words on the page.  It helps them to link back to the experiences they have had with you and this gives them some more ideas.

Many of us worked hard today to give our children time to think for themselves before helping them out.

It is just so lovely looking through these pictures and seeing how relaxed everyone is.  It is such a nice time to spend with your children.

Ilam Kindergarten Visit

This morning we had some lovely visitors from Ilam Kindergarten visit us at school.  Two of our friends are going to be coming from there soon to start at school - Brietta and Arthur.

We had a great morning together, showing them that when they start school there are lots of things that are the same between kindy and school but some things are different.  

We hope they enjoyed their time with us!