Curriculum

| Reading Recovery | Rainbow Reading | Numeracy | Integration |
| Professional Development |

Being a state school we follow the National curriculum guidelines set out by the Ministry of Education

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Reading Recovery

The Reading Recovery programme operates in the school with a number of children, between the ages of six and seven, working on individual programmes with a trained Reading Recovery teacher. This programme was developed in New Zealand and operates in many schools. It gives those children who are not ready for reading and writing in the first year of school another chance to pick up the skills needed to be successful readers and writers.

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Rainbow Reading

Support for struggling readers

Within every school there are always a group of students who don’t achieve their full potential. Staff at Central New Brighton School were particularly worried about students who year after year were not meeting their reading potential.  As these children got older the gap between their reading age and chronological age got wider - so that by the time some children were 12, they still only had a reading age of 8 years or under. The Resource Teacher of Reading was contacted and she recommended “Rainbow Reading”, an audio facilitated reading programme designed to improve children’s enjoyment, confidence, and competence in reading.

Rainbow Reading has been developed in Nelson and involves giving the students ”mileage” in reading.  The resource contains a series of graded reading books (age appropriate) that the children listen to on CD; and read and reread until they have fluency. There are also a series of supplementary task sheets available to support comprehension. Regular running records are taken to monitor progress.

 Rainbow Reading began at CNB in 2006 with at risk students being identified as part of the School's reading action plan. These students, in groups of six, were pulled out of their classes daily to work intensively with a teacher aid - employed solely to run the programme. These students also continued to be a part of their normal class reading programme.

The results were astounding. Of the forty-one children on the programme, twenty four were reading at or above their reading age by the end of the year. A further twelve students were within a year of their chronological age.

Central New Brighton School staff and Board of Trustee members are committed to continuing with the Rainbow Reading programme.

Central New Brighton celebrates these children who have grasped the gold at the end of the rainbow.

For further information on the Rainbow Reading programme please visit the following link:

www.rainbowreading.co.nz

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Numeracy

We are a 'numeracy school'. All our teachers have been trained under the numeracy initiative. This means that the early years focus is teaching number knowledge, counting, addition and subtraction.

The middle years focus is to extend knowledge to include multiplication and division, place value, and number strategies to problem solve.

The senior years extend earlier teaching with the focus on the various strategies that can be used to find a solution to a number based problem.

Teaching a range of strategies, rather than focusing on 'the answer' leads children to find and use the style of thinking that best suits them to problem solve.

Other aspects of mathematics are still taught with greater time given to these, as children move through the school.

In the junior school 80% of math teaching is spent on number (arithmetic), while in the senior school 50% of the time is spent on number and 50% spent on the other math areas.

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Integration

While core learning must take place to develop basic skills for reading, writing and mathematics life skills are never so separate – you read and use maths to cook; you plan and use maths to build; you read and write to gain a driving license.

Planning to develop skills and knowledge requires a combination of curriculum areas. Topic work is planned and taught to make links across the curriculum to reflect real life situations.

At Central New Brighton an inquiry process has been developed to teach skills for children to become independent learners as they question, gather information, review information, revise work present findings, and reflect on the outcome. Ways of organizing information are taught using a range of thinking skills – lists, pictures, positives and negatives, mind mapping, de Bono's thinking hats are a few of these.

This supports teaching and learning through integration of the curriculum, mirroring the real world.

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Professional Develpment

At Central New Brighton we think it is important for teachers to keep up with current theory in teaching and learning.

To this end 'whole school' professional development takes place so all teachers and children, from year 1 to year 8, are benefiting from 'best practice' at the same time, year-by-year. Individual teachers are also encouraged to enhance their teaching in other areas to benefit the school. E.g. Reading Recovery training and teaching.

There have been many changes and Ministry of Education initiatives over the past few years. The next few years will see the adaptation and development of teaching and learning to meet the expectations of the new curriculum document being released at the end of 2007.

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