Class paepae 2

Since we starting incorporating the class paepae into our morning routines, it has been going so wonderfully. The children understand this process and have become more confident about how the paepae is ran and what they need to say. As a part of papepae, children are learning to their mihi. It is a simple mihi to say their name and where they are from. Most of the children are very confident at saying their name using Ko.... ahau. We are learning to say where we are from using No....ahau. 

Celebrating Matariki with whānau

This year, we have celebrated Matariki together with our whānau. We made pizza and had shared kai. Many whanau brought a lot of food for us to share. It was so wonderful to be able to see our whanau, talk to them about their children and enjoy this time where we shared love for each other. We have read the book called "Matariki Breakfast" and from that children have learnt about what people do for Matariki and it is to spend time with the people we love. 

I have asked parents to write down their aspirations for their children on a star shaped piece of paper. This allowed me to know what the parents thoughts and how they want their child to grow into the future. I also thought about including some of these into the report writing highlighting what types of dispositions they have developed over time. 

Parents' aspirations 

Trying out Yolanda programme

After going to Yolanda's training. I really wanted this to be my inquiry to see how effective it will be for me and the children.
As I was waiting for the resources to arrive, I have found a good site for pictures with alphabets. I cut out just pictures to use for the Stage 2 programme.
I have gone through Yolanda's video and wrote down some steps of the Stage 2 and Stage 4 so that it will be easy for me to read as I go through the steps with the children.
Stage 1 and 2 
Stage 4 

So far I have been trying the stage 2 with the whole class and it is working really great. With my target children for the inquiry, I see them every week to see how much they have retained the letter sound knowledge.

I do feel that it makes children to feel successful as it is very achievable for the children. I felt that organising and managing the whiteboards/pens/eraser were a bit chaotic in the beginning, but I used Velcro to attach a pen and an eraser for each whiteboard and this seemed to work better so that I am not spending too much time giving out the items in the beginning.

I also feel that in the beginning, I needed the script for me to go through the steps of the Stage 2 properly but now I have done this for the last 2 weeks that I have felt more confident at doing the Yolanda programme.