Team 13 Newsletter

Amazing to think that we are now more than half way through term 3. Is it just me or does this year seem to have flown past?

What do we have in store for the rest of this term?

The Arts

Well, now that book week is over we will be having a big focus on the Arts. As you will already know from the school Newsletter we are having an Arts fortnight in weeks 8 & 9. Throughout this fortnight there will be a big range of wonderful events happening. We will have a grand opening, performances galore from all the teams, buskers, an open Arts day where you will be welcome to walk through the school and see al the wonderful Art that will be happening that day, Arts displayed in the Village from every child in the school and an Art Extravaganza evening to name but a few. The Arts Extravaganza evening will be filled with children and adults performing their amazing musical talents for one and all to enjoy.

Days coming up that will concern you are:

• Friday 27th August - National Standards letters go home with your child.
  
• Friday 10th September - 5.30 - 7.00pm. Junior team production. There will be a gold coin donation at the door for this and it will be held in the Hall. The children are to go to their allocated classrooms by 5.30 ready for their performance at 6pm. (Please note if you have children in the senior school their production is in the Ngaio Marsh Theatre on Wednesday night 8th September.)
• Wednesday 15th September - Arts Open day. There will be a programme going home before this date to tell you what is going on, where and when. Remember you will be invited to see what is going on throughout the school not just in your child's classes but in all the classes. You can check out what the middle school is doing and what the senior school get up to etc you will not be restricted to the junior school or just the class that you have a child in.
• Thursday 16th September - Arts extravaganza evening. From 6pm - 7.30pm the village will be open for an amazing variety of talent from our children, teachers and other adults within our school community. This is the best of the best on show and well worth a look. There will also be a gold coin donation for this event.
• Wednesday 22nd Thursday 23rd September - Student Learning Conferences
• Friday 24th September - Last day of term.
  

Parent Talk Time

• Friday 27th September - There is a talk on Dyslexia this Friday at 9am in the staffroom.
• Also come to the talk by Richard Taylor - How Boys Learn. This is on Wednesday September 1st at 7.30pm in the village. Very enlightening.

Our Learning Journey

We have a new system that just started this week to make the children more responsible for their own learning. They have a weekly rubric of everything that is to be done within each day. There are must dos like story-writing, learning spelling words, a maths activity and handwriting and then there are extra activities that the children can do that are conducive to the children learning. Some of the children are at the stage now where they can choose when to do these activities throughout the day. I still have a routine of set times because that is when I work with groups and the children can chose if they want to do reading at reading time or they could do a different activity and do reading another time. Some children need to stick with the routines and this is fine too.

This is new and as we go through it we will modify it to work better and easier for us. The children seem to really enjoy having that responsibility, some are struggling with it but that is also a learning curve for them to realise how they learn, some need a lot of structure and some are happy to choose their own way. Having said that, here is our focus for our learning.

Maths
Fractions, We are learning to find halves, quarters, and other fractions of sets and shapes.
Written Language
Narratives continued. We are learning to plan, write, edit and publish our work.
Handwriting and Poetry
Our handwriting focus is on triple blend beginnings like 'scr' and 'shr' etc. On Friday's we get a poem and worksheet with this focus.
Topic
We are still learning about the seasons and how and why they change. We are teaming up with Room 1 for the junior production where we have all 4 seasons represented with the different arts. For example Autumn is drama, Summer is Dance, Winter is Music and Spring is Visual Art. We are lucky enough to have some extra support to help teach some of these, thank you to Miss Phelps who is helping with the Dance and Sarah Buchanan (Hugo's mum) helping out with Drama. Children will need to wear clothes representative of their season. Please ask your child what Season and Art group they belong to. Winter/Music will be dressed in black or navy blue, Summer/Dance to be dressed in yellow, Autumn/Drama in browns, red and/or orange and Spring/Visual in green. Thank you for your support with this.

Well that's certainly enough info for now, I hope I haven't blown your mind with too much with this novel.

Enjoy the rest of the term and I will see you at the Student Led Conferences in week 10.