We love learning in the Junior School!
In our Literacy sessions our main focus is supporting students to read and spell by learning the essential letter/sound ‘code’ of the alphabet to enable segmenting and blending of sounds, this enables students to read and spell words. We use decodable texts at school and for home reading to build students’ confidence and their love of reading.
In our Writing sessions students learn to orally construct and then write simple, compound and complex sentences, because we know “if they can’t say it, they can’t write it”. We also immerse students in a variety of different text types and genres through picture story books, big books and online material.
In our Numeracy sessions we love hands-on learning, so students learn essential maths concepts by using lots of different materials, like dominoes, blocks, dice, counters as well as playing maths games to keep them engaged and having fun!
Excursions in the Junior School are so much fun, we try to link their Inquiry Topic learning to an experience they will remember forever, for example after learning all about the habitats and external features of animals we visited the Dolphin Research Institute in Hastings to learn all about the Weedy Sea Dragon.
The Year Two students also get to have their first ‘Camp Experience’ where they go to a school camp for a day, participate in some activities and get a feel for what camp life is really like, this prepares them for their first official camp when they are in Middle School.
The Junior school is a supportive environment where we help students to build upon their independence, social skills and encourage them to become lifelong learners.