Kōwhai News Term 1 Week 5

What a fantastic fortnight it has been! We now have literacy and maths groups up and running, and the tamariki have been amazing at flexibly and quickly joining their groups. Enjoy reading about our recent adventures and learning.

Things for Discovery 

Construction is a hit during Discovery time. Please send in old boxes, egg cartons and anything else that might be useful for us :-)

Wellbeing 

Friendships have been our Wellbeing topic over the last two weeks, along with a continued focus on interoception and our school-wide PB4L focus, respect. 

With friendships, we have talked about and role-played what makes a good friend and how to deal with problems with friends. Some tips include: 

• Talk about it 
• Use ‘ I ‘ statements (model this) and share your feelings
• Listen actively 
• Ask for the other person to share their thoughts or feelings
• Think of some ways to solve the problem 
• Get an adult to help if you can’t agree, or if your friend isn’t listening to you

Interoception 

Interoception means sensing internal signals from your body, like when you are hungry, when your heart is beating fast, or when you need the toilet. These are all necessary precursors to positive development and self-regulation and self-management. We use short, fun interoception activities to help everyone find a sense of calm in their bodies, and therefore be better managers of ourselves, our behaviours and our learning.

Maths 

After a fun two weeks of learning about 2D and 3D shapes and their attributes, we're now moving into place value and basic facts. You can help your child at home by:

• having them read and order numbers, low to high 
• playing games such as 'guess my number' where children ask if a mystery number is higher than or lower than
• quick thinking addition and subtraction games like rolling and adding dice, 24, or other games
• identifying how many tens and ones, or hundreds, tens and ones in a number
• forward and backwards counting in 1s, 2s, 5s and 10s, from various start points

Also, log into the school intranet at home to play Nick's maths games...lots of fun and learning to be had!

Top Team 

A huge thanks to Anna Reid for organising this, and to parents who helped out on the day. You were amazing at encouraging and supporting the tamariki - tino pai tō mahi!

Discovery Photos