Daily diaries

We see the daily diaries as a great opportunity to give you an insight into what children are doing during the day so you can discuss it further at night. They also support our reading program as children can read back their own sentences. These diaries are important and we need your help to ensure that they continue. 

We would love volunteers to come in each day and scribe a sentence or two about project time for each child by asking them such questions as 'What have you been doing today' and 'What did you discover/learn?'. Project Time is something children like writing about. Children then read and illustrate this page at home. 

On Thursday Peta (M's mum) volunteered in Project Time which was great and we were once again able to send Daily Diaries home. I know lots of families would like the daily diaries to continue and we ask for your help to make this happen every day except for Monday. If you can help out please come and see us or send an email.

Tips for reading at home

There are so many reasons why we read and so many strategies that we use. Keep these in mind when reading with your children. They don’t need to do everything at once! It will all come in time. The most important thing though is to ensure that we all, children included, are reading for meaning – comprehension is vital!

Below are some ideas for you to use to support children in developing their reading. 

• Make predictions: read the title and look at the front cover, then make predictions of what the book will be about; stop part way through the story and predict what will happen next. You can also draw or write about your predictions. 
• Remind them to point to each word as they read. 
• Look at the picture and make a prediction – what will this page be about? Choose an important word from this prediction and see if you can find it in the text – the child doesn’t have to read the whole page if it is too much for them. 
• Celebrate their reading behaviours - following print in the right direction, using the pictures to gain meaning, etc. Tell the child that they can read, that by looking at the pictures they are already readers. 
• If the child still needs to learn some letters and sounds, find letters and sounds in the world around you - go on a letter walk, listening to sounds from words represented in the world around you, eg. b in bin. Always teach the child letters, sounds and frequently used words in context so it is meaningful. 
• Be word detectives and find out all the interesting things you can about letter/sound blends and combinations (eg sh, ch, ing, ou) and new words.  
• What was the book about? Summarise and retell. 
• Make a connection with your own life.  
• Find a word you don’t know the meaning of then work out what it could mean together. 
• What is your opinion of the book? Explain. 
• What did you learn that was new? What did you already know? 
• How did this book make you feel? What was the mood of the book?  
• What do you think would have happened next in the story if it had kept going?

Tips for writing at home and using the children’s diaries

Get the child to re-read their sentence to you. Encourage them to point to the words as they read. If they haven’t drawn the picture yet, get them to do this.

Further ideas of activities you can do include:

• write another sentence. 
• if the teacher or a family helper wrote the sentence, then at home the children could re-write the sentence. 
• practice re-writing the sentence to improve writing, ie view the first time or two as drafts and then do a good copy, working on leaving spaces, forming letters the right way around (if some were back to front initially), using capitals and lower case letters correctly etc.  
• think about other words that have similar letters and sounds. 

The readers can be stored in the boxes on the entrance table with the purple tablecloth in the morning so they are ready for our next diary writing session.  

Most importantly, have fun! Reading and writing at home should be an enjoyable time for everyone. 

Week 4 Update

Café Excursion

On Thursday 1^st March a group of students from our room who have been building and running a café on the terrace went on an excursion with a group of Triciclo students to visit a real café to their enrich their experience. 

We observed all the different fixtures and elements that make up a working café.  Some of the things that we noticed in particular were the sugar pots on the tables, the lights, television, cake stand and the all-important coffee machine!  We were able to ask the owner questions about how the café runs, and he told us how important it is to keep everything clean, where he buys the ingredients for the food, and what he does during the day to keep the café running smoothly. 

We recorded our observations with drawings, and a few students were brave writers who had a go at taking notes as well. 

We will be running more excursions as well as community walks over the next few weeks.  Each excursion is planned in response to the specific interests of the children, therefore often only a small group from our learning community will attend each excursion.   As you have already signed a permission form for local excursions, we will let you know via email the day before if your child will be attending a local excursion – no notes are necessary.

Readers

Readers have started this week!  We know that you’re all very excited, and the children have been eager for some time.   It’s wonderful to see the excitement that the children have for this activity and also to see that you all share and celebrate this enthusiasm with them. This is an exciting time and a positive attitude to simple routines like this makes for a great start to kids’ reading lives. 

You can change the reader in the morning between 8:45 and 9:00 or in the afternoon before you go home.  Children should put their reading folder straight back into their bag once they have changed it.  If they don’t get a chance to change it in the morning, they can leave their folder in the tub under the reading table in case a family helper is able to change it with them during learning time. If you would like to read a book that you have at home with your child instead of one from the reader boxes that’s fine, just remember to record it in the reading sheet on the inside left cover of the folder. 

At the start of the year, the books were sorted into the coloured boxes that correspond with the coloured dot on the back of each book. Please help the children to put books back in the right box to make choosing books of various levels easier.

Some ideas on how to support your child reading at home will be posted soon.

If you want to help out with the readers during the day, just let us know. You can read take-home books with children so they feel familiar and confident with them by the time they take them home. You can also help children whose folders are in the tubs under the tables to choose new books to take home that night, remembering to get them to put their folders in their bags once they have chosen a new book and read it with you.

We ask you to keep the number of books that you borrow to a maximum of two, including weekends – we are so glad that you are enthusiastic and that you love books, and encourage you to borrow books from your local library if two isn’t enough.

Daily Diaries

We have started our individual daily diaries this week as well.  We aim to draw and write something that we did at school in our diaries each day. At this stage we are largely scribing for the children, and although we do try to get through each child’s diary with them it’s not always possible. You can use these diaries as a sentence starter with your children.

Some ideas on how to support your with the diary at home will be posted soon.