This week, as part of our Speech Session with Helen Griffiths, we hunted to find Matariki stars around the school.
We also completed some stars to add to our mural in Kopa Wha as well as practising our Matariki Dance.
I have also included Kopa Rima’s beautiful Matariki display outside their room.
Have a wonderful Matariki Day tomorrow and we look forward to seeing you all next Tuesday morning for our early morning Puanga Breakfast beginning at 6.45am.
This week Kopa Wha has been focusing on the Letter Gg. We have been using our new Better Start Literacy resources and investigating a variety of words beginning with the letter Gg.
We have also been discussing what we are grateful for on a daily basis. We found a variety of pictures of things we are grateful for in magazines and stuck them onto our colourful leaves. This created a beautiful mobile for each tamariki.
Today Whaea Bridget worked alongside our tamariki to create a tree which we can hang our grateful leaves on. Next week I will update this blog with photos of the completed activity. We are very excited to share our mahi with you.
Every Wednesday we are so very fortunate to have our Occupational Therapist and Physiotherapist join Whare Manaaki to work alongside our tamariki.
Our students all visit Autism Connex where they work on a variety of gross motor movements on the amazing apparatus available. Each student works on a variety of different goals while in this relaxing and engaging space.
There are a variety of swings available and they are always utilised well.
Which activity do you think you would enjoy the most?
This week Kopa Wha has been working on the Letter Ff.
We have been looking at the emotion of frustration and what that may look like. This emotion appears often throughout our day at school in numerous settings. Our tamariki have been looking at a variety of short clips of others feeling frustrated when playing with a variety of toys. An example of this is when we build a tower and it repeatedly falls down.
We have extended this emotion to relate to the environment as well. I shared how I become frustrated seeing rubbish when out in our beautiful environment. We incorporated our Community Outing to visit Ngamotu Beach where we put on gloves and collected rubbish from the beach. We collected a bin full of rubbish and also while we were there collected seaweed, driftwood and sand. Once we returned to school we created some artworks with our seaside findings. These are displayed outside Kopa Wha.
Our tamariki have also enjoyed reading about the ‘Rainbow Fish’. They created some beautiful collaged rainbow fishes which you can see displayed in Kopa Wha.
This week we have been looking at when we feel excited. Kopa Four thought going on a bug hunt as well as creating ladybirds was exciting. All our tamariki found the snails of particular interest and using the magnifying glass to look even closer at the snails was even more exciting. Great mahi Kopa 4. I loved watching you all being so curious in our garden.
In Kopa Wha we have been focusing on the letter Ss. We have been integrating this letter with different emotions.
An important part of our daily teaching is recognising how we are feeling. We have been introducing ‘The Zones of Regulation’ to help all our tamariki recognise the different ways we feel. These are represented by colours. We will be continuing to work on this next term.
This week we have been learning about the emotion of surprise. Our tamariki have practiced showing the emotion on their faces throughout the week. We concluded the week by creating a surprised emoji face.
We hope you enjoy the photos.
Have a fabulous holiday everyone and I look forward to seeing you all again next term.
Ruma Wha have been completing some Marvellous Math activities this week.
We incorporated sensory and fine motor activities into our Math sessions and look what we created!
Everyone had a lot of fun and the classroom was a hive of activity.
Ka pai everyone!
Welcome to Term 2. I hope everyone had a lovely holiday with their beautiful tamariki.
This week we have been focusing on the letter Ll for love and leaves.
The children have been practicing writing the letter Ll on whiteboards, chalkboards and leaves. We completed a lovely love heart with crunched up leaves as well as leaf rubbings. When we had a break in the weather we went on a leaf hunt and had lots of fun throwing leaves up into the air and watching them blow in the wind.
We look forward to the term ahead and please feel free to send Kopa Wha comments on the blog.
Fine motor activities are a huge part of our day to day programme in Ruma Wha. The benefits of working on a variety of fine motor activities is extensive from strengthening their muscles in their hands and fingers to the development of hand-eye co ordination.
Our wonderful Occupational Therapist, Paula Matheson visits Whare Manaaki on a weekly basis to work alongside our tamariki and kaiako (teachers). We hope you enjoy the montage of photos showing a variety of fine motor activities.
If you would like to find out more about fine motor skills please look at the Specialist Site below. It has some tips and tricks and different ideas for you try at home with your tamariki.
We are so fortunate to have Fiona Waugh rejoin us in Ruma Wha this year.
On a weekly basis Fiona works on various applications and skills for our students to practise.
This year we have been looking more closely at how to take a video and photos to include them into an iMovie. We have incorporated our Letter of the Week into this week’s iMovie. We looked around the classroom to see what words began with the Letter Nn.
We hope you enjoy our iMovie. All of the photos and videos were taken by our tamariki.
Thank you so much, Fiona, for your support with our iMoi. I look forward to next Wednesday.