Sunday 12 March 2017


This week in M1 we welcome our new Learning Assistant Marissa Steyn. We will share Marissa with M2. We are excited to have her join our class!

At Whangaparaoa School we have adopted the following Inquiry Cycle:
This week, we will begin moving from sorting out our information, to the 'Going Further' stage. This is a very exciting and 'buzzy' stage of our inquiry. In this stage, students will be encouraged to pose their own questions based on their wonderings or areas of interest around the topic of Community. For the next few weeks, children will be encouraged to formulate a simple question, make a plan of action to find out information, carry out that plan and then move into the reflecting and acting stage of the cycle with help. While it can seem quite complicated for 5 year olds, it is actually very intuitive for our young learners. The questions do not need to be tricky- it could be as simple as 'What can people do in our community?'  or ' How do people help each other in our school/local community? '  They may plan to find information by talking to people, walking around their community, calling people on the phone, writing letters/emails to people (with help) etc. When it comes to reflecting and acting, they may then decide to do something like- Make a list of cool places for kids in our community, host a morning tea for those people who help in the community, make a poster or show kindness by helping someone in the community. Having conversations at home about possible ideas might help your child tune in to their own wonderings too.

In Reading, we are continuing on with our comprehension strategy of Predicting. We are also talking about how good readers can 'read' unfamiliar stories by looking carefully at the pictures and imagining how the story might go. This strategy give emergent readers the confidence to have a go, and pulls together two of the recent strategies we have been working on- activating prior knowledge and predicting.

In writing, we are learning that good writers get their writing ready for an audience by fixing it up and then fancying it up. They are taking one of their pattern books from week 6 and preparing it to share. As they finish publishing, we will slip it into their blue 'Poem and Sharing' folder in their book bags for you to celebrate at home. We are learning a new strategy to help us tackle tricky words in writing this week. It is called 'Clap and Tap'. We will first begin learning how to clap the syllables in longer words and then isolate each syllable and tap out the sounds we can hear. This helps the children to more accurately hear the middle sound in long words. It can take a lot of practise for the children to learn to do this, so we will be reinforcing this skill in our word work groups also over the coming weeks by engaging in a lot of syllable activities.


Our learning continues around the passing of time this week in maths. Children will be sequencing events in order and continuing to learn about events over the week. We are also learning about compliments of 5, 10 and 20 depending on the stage we are up to in maths. These are combinations of numbers that equal either 5, 10 or 20. Knowing these combinations helps children access their basic facts quickly. We have been singing along with what is possibly the weirdest maths song ever made as part of our maths warm-up in the morning. The children LOVE it!


Apologies for missing library last week. We were so into what we were doing in class that we forgot to go to our session!! We will be back this Wednesday!

Swimming continues this Tuesday and Thursday.
Have a great week!



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