Kaitake
The wonderful Kaitake class! Taught by Jonathan Faapoi.
Kia Ora! My name is Jonathan Faapoi and I am the teacher in Kaitake room. This is my 4th year teaching at Midhirst School and I love the rural feel and friendly community. Some of my passions are music and sports and I love sharing these passions with the Tamariki.

Structured Literacy
At Midhirst school we follow a Structured Literacy approach for the teaching of Reading, Writing, Handwriting and Spelling. Structured Literacy is explicit, systematic, and sequential teaching of literacy at multiple levels – phonemes, letter–sound relationships, syllable patterns, morphemes, vocabulary, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and text structure.
In Kaitake class for structured literacy we use the Code to focus on spelling patterns, rules and morphology and a range of different texts including: decodables, novels and sophisticated picture books all integrated together to explicitly teach reading, writing and spelling.
PR1M3 Math
At Midhirst School we follow the Prime Math programme as our main approach to mathematical teaching and learning. This programme is built on clear, well-structured progressions that map a pathway through year 1-8 based on practices used by top performing countries in international studies. The Prime math programme follows two foundational principles.
Principle 1: Teaching is for learning; learning is for understanding; understanding is for reasoning and applying and, ultimately problem solving.
Principle 2: Teaching should build on students’ knowledge; take cognisance of students’ interests and experiences; and engage them in active and reflective learning.
Korowai
Te Ao: Cause and Effect
This term Kaitake classroom has been focusing on Te Ao for our Korowai curriculum. For this learning all students in Kaitake class have completed the informed and empowered programme which provided students with valuable learning about online safety and healthy relationships. From there students then began a deeper dive into healthy relationships and how the things we say or do can have effects on these relationships. For this students have created kindness contracts and begun looking at filling buckets. We look forward to updating you as the Term progresses.
Informed and Empowered Parent Information

