Rāhina 28.03.22

 Kia ora koutou

Today was a beautifully crispy, sunny autumn day at school. More and more acorns and golden leaves are finding themselves falling on to the ground. Many of these are making their way into the children's play. Today I overheard two of our tamariki counting their acorns, "Stacey, Stacey, we counted them in groups of ten! We have 290". 

After morning tea we went for a hīkoi around our play area, we reacquainted ourselves with our boundary lines and made a plan to have a working bee to tidy up the area. After eating lunch, we did a big tidy up, making a pile of fallen leaves, sweeping and pulling weeds. Ka pai tamariki! We are so happy to be back in our sandpit, digging and building. 

Our Class One children are learning from home this week, essential workers children may attend, they are joining us in Class Two. Today we welcomed one student from Class One to join us, ngā tamariki were so kind, welcoming and friendly. I have modified our Main Lesson learning to be appropriate to the younger children who may be with us, adding numbers up to 100 using strategies has been put on hold for now and instead we will begin our Saint Michael main lesson tomorrow. 

Home learning ideas....

For Kid Writing today I gave the prompt "if you could be any animal, what would you be, what would you be able to do if you were that animal?" 

Together we wrote about being a cat. First we brainstormed ideas of what cats do (some morbid), then started writing, taking care to check our heart word wall for high frequency words. 

By modelling the writing the children had a lot of the main words written for them, they only had to change a few and think of the sounds they can hear in each word. 

"If I was an animal, I would be a ______. I would (2 things you would do as that animal). 

Some children are working on beginning sounds, others are working on final sounds, some are working on middle sounds. Remember we are still at a phonological stage of writing, they write the sounds they hear, not the spelling rules we know as adults. Praise, praise, praise, all writing is good writing at this point. We want to build the children's self-efficacy so they continue to take risks and are open to learning challenges. 

For maths we played games of three digit guess my number. The children guess 3 digit numbers eg: 621, I write on the board the number in a colour code. Green is correct number, correct place. Orange is correct number, wrong place. Blue is wrong number. You could try playing at home!

If your child is yet to feel confident counting up to 100 and recognising the digits that correlate, I recommend spending some time practicing. Count objects around your home, buttons, acorns, dried beans etc. 

I do hope you are all well, sending you all my love. 

Arohanui

Stacey