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!

Mihi Mihi

In oral language, we are going to be working hard to learn our mihi.  To help us with this, we are making a visual representation called our mihi mihi.  Today we were colouring in our names which is one of the very first parts of our mihi we will learn.  Some of us completed these in a patterns.  Some of us chose to do them in our favourite colours.  Some of us just coloured them in in a variety of colours.  They are going to look wonderful on our mihi mihi posters that we can use to help us to learn our mihi.

Miss Cultrera and Miss Browne were very pleased at how careful the learners were completing this part of their mihi mihi because they know how special these will be.

Ka pai Red and Blue Homebases!

Numeracy

Miss St John is a NZ Graduate School Intern who is working in our team at the moment.  She is teaching a group of our learners at numeracy time.  They were working on adding groups of equipment together, using the context of garages and cars.  It can be a bit tricky sometimes to realise that the same numbers of cars can be there altogether even though they are in two places.

Te Waka o Matariki

We really enjoy all the different activities at Te Waka o Matariki time.  We are learning how to work and play together, how to work in our learning spaces, and to learn some phonics knowledge and some numeracy knowledge.

 Cyrus talked about how tall his structure was.  We compared this to his friends and found out who was taller and shorter than it.

 Danial is learning to say the colours in English.  He enjoyed painting his rainbow while we talked about each colour he was using.

 Emmett enjoyed painting his rainbow.  We celebrated that he used more than just his favourite colour of green!

 Raven enjoys any of the activities to choose from and she showed perseverance to stay and finish an activity fully, showing excellence.

 Amira also enjoys all of the activities.  She also showed perseverance and self managing skills to stay at her activity until it was fully finished, showing excellence.

 Miss St John likes to talk to us about our learning.  We showed her the patterns we were making with the beads and the pipe cleaners.  We were trying to make them into Shamrocks but it was a little bit tricky.  We made them into bracelets instead.

 Jacob and Zak enjoyed building towers and knocking them down.  We talked about how this was fun but that we needed to respect the other learners in our space.  They decided to build but not to knock them down.

 Brietta and Fatima worked on developing their strength in their fingers for fine motor skills.  They thought they were just having fun putting beads onto a pipe cleaner until we talked about our fine motor bags and how they were good for building muscles.

 Joseph and Jasper also enjoyed putting the beads on in patterns.  They stuck at their activity until they were finished also, showing perseverance and excellence.

 Una and Lene were enjoying talking about the train set and what was in it while they tried to make the track again.  It is a tricky job and Lene was explaining all the different parts they were using.