Monday, February 9, 2015

Home Learning Term 1

9th February 2015

Ruma Kākāpō Home Learning 2015

Dear Parents and Students of Ruma Kākāpō

Listed below is a range of activities that you can regularly include in your Home Learning.  It is important that you work together to develop good strategies and habits to continue learning at home. Parent’s please do not assume that your child knows when is the best time to engage in Home Learning, the best time in my opinion is all the time.  They should do around 20 – 45 minutes on a range of activiites each day including reading.

Home Learning can include lots and lots of regular discussion on any items of interest / family history / current events that catches your family’s imagination.

It doesn’t matter what your child reads, as long as they get a balance of reading to you, reading with you, and reading for themselves. Books, magazines, comics, newspapers, model aeroplane instructions, the back of the Weet Bix packet … whatever: it doesn’t matter. As long as kids are doing something that they are interested in, they will read it, enjoy it, and be all the happier and better off for it (so will you). You could read a book together or share opinions about the books that you are both reading.  Students should be reading for at least 15 minutes at home per day.

Spelling practice is not just lists of words (which the pupil may never otherwise use) set by a teacher: it includes crosswords, word-finds, word puzzles, secret codes, Scrabble – all of which can be easily found. Have your child write you a letter, you'll soon be able to develop an additional set of words to learn as part of their Home Learning.  The class blog has the students’s spelling list posted on it weekly, commencing in Week 3.  These words are also recorded into the Home Learning Spelling Notebook on a Monday at school.




If your child has trouble with basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, division; don’t rely solely on the practice that he or she will get at school to improve the situation. If you sit together a couple of times a week and work through some practice examples that you have set together, the practice will be far more valuable than facing five set questions on a class homework sheet. Why? Because it will be individualised to your child’s needs. Because you will be sharing the experience. Because you will be able to provide instant and positive feedback.

Regular sharing and reflecting on student's learning through the monitoring of their Learning Portfolios is essential. Ask your child to share their work samples on their blog or log in to their email accounts to see how their assessments are going.  Students regularly log onto their blogs and email accounts at school, please get them to show you how to access theirs.  You can also access your child’s blog from our class blog by selecting the Learning Portfolio link.  Our class blogs web address is:

Home Learning can include outside the home experiences; all those Sport practices, clubs and family excursions and holidays.   It can also include the chores that your child is required to complete to contribute to your home life.

Student may aso like to join our classes Science Badge group.  This group meets every Wednesday lunchtime to share the projects they have worked on at home.  This will commence after camp.

From time to time there will be an additional Home Learning task required for students to prepare for school activities.  These will be glued into the students’ Home Learning Books, emailed to your families and the students school email address.  The first of these is a sheet that explains the Home Learning preparation that is required for their class Autobiography project. 

I hope this letter helps to support the Home Learning that your family choose to engage in.  If you would like to clarify any of the information that I have included, please contact me.

Warm regards

Linda Douglas





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