Student Support Centre

Learning Support Staff

The Board of Trustees in partnership with Ngati Whakaue Endowment Trust provides additional teacher staffing and teacher aide resourcing to support children with their learning at St Michael's School. The Learning Support staff members currently working at our school are:

Tracey Goodrick 

Ra Ward

Natalie Rickard

Tina Heatherington

Range of programmes offered
Our Learning Support team offers a range of programmes, which may vary from term to term depending upon the current needs of the students. Programmes offered at Rotorua Primary include the following:

Oral language support – designed to increase the spoken word knowledge and foundation of young children
Phonological awareness – designed to increase children’s knowledge of sounds and letters
Soundcheck – a programme designed to build correct sound to print connections, or letter / sound relationships
Early Words – a programme designed to support children with the acquisition of the all important high frequency words to kick start their early reading
Reading support – offered across a range of year levels to support students develop their decoding skills and understanding of print 
Toe X Toe - A program offered to support struggling readers or who present with dyslexic difficulties
Writing support – offered across a range of year levels to support children develop their writing skills
Spelling support – specifically targeting children’s recording of sound to print
Mathematics support – in-class support of students with the acquisition of mathematical concepts, particularly focusing on the number strand.

Supporting your children with their learning at home
Oral Language
Ideas to improve conversational skills and develop oral language foundation:
1. Try not to use too many questions. Instead, try and make statements and see if they can join in, e.g. “I went shopping today and you went…”

2. Encourage your child to ask you questions: Ask directly, e.g. “Ask Mummy, what did you do today?” Encourage follow-up questions, e.g. “I went shopping today. What can you ask me?” What did you…?”

3. If your child has poor eye contact, remind them that they must look at your eyes when you are talking. Keep reminding them by saying, “Eyes,” or “Looking.”

4. Use a home / school diary. This will give you and your child a visual representation (to help aid their memory and recall) of what has happened during the day.

Links to useful interactive websites

Here are some great websites, which will support your child with their learning at home.
www.FunBrain.com (great website for reading, writing and mathematics at all Year levels)
www.starfall.com (a great website for learning the alphabet, word families, and then ‘It’s Fun to Read’ is useful for children reading from Orange onwards)
www.sunshineonline.co.nz (Reading for emergent, early and fluent readers) Parents and children are welcome to use the Elmwood login (Username: elmwood; Password: sunshine)
www.amblesideprimary.com/ambleweb/mentalmaths/countersquare.html (an interactive hundreds board which is useful for learning to skip counter and work with numbers to 100)
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/mathgames/placevalue/value.htm (a really useful website for strengthening children’s understanding of place value)
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/place-value/place-value-charts (another useful website for developing place value knowledge)
http://www.novelgames.com/en/spgames/mathlines/ (a useful website for helping children learn their number bonds to 10)
http://www.mathplayground.com/number_bonds_30.html (another useful website for learning number bonds to 30)
http://www.prototec.co.nz/maths.html (a really useful website, without all the bells and whistles, to support children with learning their basic facts, especially number unknown e.g. 6 + ? = 10)
http://www.topmarks.co.uk/maths-games/hit-the-button (a great site to visit for learning the multiplication and division basic facts) (a spelling game, like Boggle)