Paeroa’s Miller Avenue Primary School has developed a gentler approach to beginning school – and it’s seeing benefits for all the new entrants.
The programme, called Te Koru, has seen the school split its new entrant class into two groups for portions of the day.
Brand-new students are taken into a separate room each morning with a teacher aide to work on basic school-readiness skills such as holding a pencil, learning letters and numbers, and getting used to structured mat time and break times.
Meanwhile, students who have been at the school for a while convene in the room next door where they undertake more traditional learning in a larger group.
The two classes reunite in the afternoons for physical education, topic studies and art.
The split-room approach has been key to a successful and stress-free transition to school, acting principal David Cooke told The Profile.
“What we’ve done is to establish a structure within the school in terms of classroom management… so that these new entrant children will move from perhaps what might have been a more freely based daycare or play centre environment into a more structured school without going straight into a structured classroom.”
The programme was trialled in term two, and David said the children and their parents responded well to the approach.
Currently, the school has around six children in the transition group.
They will remain there for around four to six weeks, depending on their needs, before being fully integrated with the main class.
Teacher aide Drewe Fell, who works with the newest students, said her teaching space is about filling in the gaps in a calm and peaceful atmosphere.
“We’re just doing the basics, getting them ready to go in for the next class,” she said.
“It’s letter identification and the motor skills that they may not have picked up on… Because not a lot of the kindys now do the five-year-old plans.
“We’ve got some [kids] that we’ve already pushed through as well, if we notice that they’ve already got those basic skills.”
And teacher Andrea Adams, in the main new entrant class, said the programme was helpful for the more established students as well.
“I can extend and keep going with [the older ones],” she said.
“And then as they get a few weeks in there, we’ll see who needs to come and do some writing.
“It’s working awesomely.”
