At PK our everyday learning ensures tamariki have the dispositions and skills to be successful at school. In addition, our curriculum includes a range of extension experiences aimed at further developing tamariki literacy and numeracy skills before they start school.
Tamariki join our Ready4School programme after they turn 4. As part of this programme our tamariki participate in excursions each week around the local area to parks and the Devonport library. Parents are welcome to join these excursions. However, there is no requirement to join the excursion as additional staff are rostered on to ensure safe ratios of teachers to children during these excursions. Children participating in these excursions bring their own lunchboxes so they can eat at our community parks.
In addition, the programme also consistes of a few short sessions (Around 15-20 mins) per week focusing specifically on developing literacy and numeracy skills which require adult-support to learn. In the area of literacy, the programme focuses on developing phonological awareness, comprehension, print awareness, alphabet knowledge, visual discrimation skills, and environmental print knowledge. This is taught through
- learning games, group games to encourage visual discrimination and eye tracking
- memory, visual and auditory discrimination
- Phonics
- Letter recognition and formation
- Writing in meaningful contexts such as invitations, signs, menus and books.
In the area of numeracy, we focus on number and operations, (counting, comparing and ordering), Geometry and Spatial Sense, Measurement, and patterns. Some of the ways we do this are
- Exploring patterns and positional language (up, down, over, below, on, under etc)
- Exploring opposites
- Matching and naming objects
- Sorting, classifying objects
- One to one correspondence (put a cup on each saucer etc)
- Solve everyday problems e.g. how many tamariki are there? How many cups/chairs plates do we need? Count the buckets in the sand pit.
- Plenty of hands on exploration of concrete objects and natural loose parts
- Explore concept of “how many?”, “more”,” more than” “Less”, “less than” etc
- Practical hands-on experience of pattern making, sorting and counting objects such as pebbles, counters, blocks, shells, cars and toys etc.
- Recognising numerals in the environment e.g. on calendars, on letter boxes etc.
- Number recognition and formation