Welcome to Tautoru 2015

Dear Tautoru Families Welcome back to the new school year. We hope you have had fantastic holidays with your families and that your child is as excited as we are to be starting the 2015 school year in the Tautoru team. We would like to welcome four new children and their families to our team; Kirsty and Alastair Cunningham, Ari Zandi and Lucia Weddell. We would also like to say a big welcome to Aimee Elliott who has joined the teaching team in Tautoru. How will Tautoru work? Children will continue to get the opportunity to work with a wide range of children in a variety of group settings and with each of the four teachers within our team. We will be utilizing and taking every opportunity to use the great indoor and outdoor spaces available to us to maximize learning as well. Your child will start the school day with their base group teacher every morning for the first 10-15 minutes. In Literacy your child will have the opportunity to work with more than one teacher for their writing and reading. During this time your child will be writing, reading, and be engaged in instructional and independent tasks according to their needs. During their Numeracy sessions they will have one teacher who will take them for their small group guided maths sessions. This teacher will change throughout the year. They will also work with the other teachers when engaged in independent and larger group learning. In the afternoons, the children will work in groups across the junior school. During this time there will be a focus on teaching inquiry skills and exploring many learning areas of the very full curriculum! Our first inquiry ‘What is in my backyard?’ lends itself to a lot of opportunities to be scientists, archaeologists, inventors, creators and thinkers. On Thursday 26th February we will be running our first parent workshop; during this time we will be able to talk through our programme with you in far more detail and answer any questions you have for us. Details about this will be in next week’s newsletter. We are looking forward to seeing you at the Family Picnic next Wednesday.We would also love to see as many of you as possible at the powhiri to welcome new families on Friday 20th February at 9.30 am if you can make it. Morning tea will follow. 2015 promises to be a productive, action packed and exciting year. Please feel free to contact us at anytime if you have any queries via email or visit us in the Tautoru classroom before or after school. Our school emails are: djohanson@worserbay.school.nz aelliott@worserbay.school.nz gmenaker@worserbay.school.nz cturnbull@worserbay.school.nz> We look forward to catching up with you soon. Kind Regards Danny, Aimee, Chrissy and Gillian