Week 6 Term 3 2021

 Well done everyone, we have all survived our first full week of Online Learning. It was so lovely to see your children's faces on our zoom/meet sessions. The children coped really well and shared lots of stories and fun. Thanks for helping your child to upload their wonderful stories onto Educa. This is an awesome way for us to interact with each other. Please keep uploading the stories and photos-we just love receiving them.

Level 3/4

We will be staying at Level 4 until Tuesday at 11:59pm. After this we should be moving to Level 3. We are waiting for the Ministry of Education to update Alert Level 3 guidelines which might be different from last year. Once we have received these we will let you know the plan. In the meantime, could you please complete a Level 3 survey for each child you have in a class at school. The survey needs to be completed by 9am Monday 30th August. Thanks to those parents and caregivers who have taken the time to fill in the form already.

Here is the link to the Kakano 3 survey

Help for others

There may be families in the community that you know of who need some help and assistance. Please let us know of any families you think we can support at this time.

Phonics online

This week we will be trialling our new phonics lessons online from Monday to Thursday. Some of your children may find this a little easy at first. We would like them to continue with the programme to understand how it runs and reinforce the spelling rules that will be covered. Please, can your child bring a whiteboard and marker or a pen and paper, if you have them, to the session.

Sunshine Classics-Reading

It's awesome to see our students reading the Sunshine Classic books. This will be their reading until we return to school at Level 2. When your child has finished reading we would like them to complete the activities that go with each book. This will help their understanding of the story. There is an option to record their reading. We are enjoying being able to listen to the reading fluency and hear the strategies that our kids are using. We can use these recordings to give feedback and know what support to give.

Learning through play

Our ‘normal’ 9am-3pm day is jam packed with learning. However, it is important to remember that only a part of this time, for your child, is in formal and intensive individual or small group teaching. The normal attention span of a 6-7 year old is only 12-18minutes so we don’t tend to stay focused on one activity for more than 20minutes. Learning through play helps your child to practice new skills, explore, experiment, discover, and solve problems in imaginative and playful ways. This week, we have included a curriculum slide so that you can see how our play activities link to the NZ Curriculum. Just going for a walk and talking about the things that you can see, hear, feel… helps build their science, social studies, maths and literacy skills. Cooking is maths, science, literacy and key competencies. Helping with household chores is social studies, key competencies, maths, technology… Stay calm and play on = you are doing a great job! 

Super Kids Awards

This week St Mary’s School had a virtual assembly. These are the children from Kakano 1, 2 and 3 who received a Super Kids award. Well done

Here is the link to our Virtual Assembly.

Learning slides

The slides below will outline the learning for the week, update you on anything new and offer times for your child to meet with us online.  You are most welcome to join us for these sessions, especially the Monday chats. The Monday meetings will outline the learning for the week and will act as a check in to see how we are all going.  The learning will be in a slide deck that will be embedded with this post. You should be able to move through the slides and click on the links. Let us know if you have any problems. On Friday our zoom/meet sessions will be a Show and Tell  for the children to share their news.