Term 2 2013

Halfway through the year already. My class has changed with Year 1 students joining us. The dynamics and needs are a lot wider now. They have made the move quite easily though - it certainly helps with having Discovery Time together each week and this last term we also did our Technology - making biscuits together. 

All children are either at or above where I expected them to be mid year in reading which is really pleasing. I will continue with my programme with the lower level readers and begin to have the more able readers more independent.

I have continued with Reading Recovery once a day with a child and they are now at the expected level for their age. Next term I start a child that has been at school just a year and is not really interested in reading or writing so this will be a nice challenge for me

In Maths we have been working on Time, Geometry (shape) and Number - add/sub. The new NZ Maths pink book is out and it is much more user friendly. We incorporated art into our shape unit by painting pictures in Kandinsky style.

Time Unit

This term I went to a course in Dunedin on Solo Taxonomy. Pam made it look so easy to use in class. There are lots of templates available on her website http://pamhook.com/. I can see it working in the senior classes but am not sure about the juniors. I am going to trial it this term to see if we will incorporate right through.  

I also attended a course after school by Stephen Graham (Nelson Learning) on Report Writing. He was very interesting and broke the writing process of reports right down into easy manageable steps.

We have been learning Ukulele this term and played one of our songs at assembly on the last day of term. It is fabulous to see that even Year 1 and 2 children are able to play an instrument and sing at the same time