Kia Ora! Hello! I’m very excited to be teaching at Glenbrook school. I have the pleasure of teaching the amazing and fantastic New Entrant and Year 1 students in Parekereke.

I grew up in the Waikato in Te Awamutu and after high school went to Waikato University. I completed my Post Graduate Diploma of Teaching in 2000 and have worked in a variety of different schools from small to very big including four years as Syndicate Leader/ Assistant Principal at Pakuranga Heights primary.

I have two beautiful girls- 3 year old Isla and 5 year old Niamh, who has  started in Parekereke last March. We love to go to the zoo, Miranda Hot pools and go on lots of mini adventures together as a family. 

I look forward to watching the amazing students in my class achieve their personal goals this year and am so pleased to be able to be a part of their learning journey at Glenbrook school.

Parekereke is our transition class which means all new starters to school start in Room 1. Our classroom is set up to be a transition between an Early Childhood Centre and the more formal setting of primary school. We are learning the school rules and routines and how to be responsible for our belongings and our learning.

In New Entrants, ERO guidance suggests 272 minutes per day are spent on literacy, which is 4.5 hours or most of our day!

We start each day with writing, which is either about our weekend or about the topic we are studying at school. Students move through the stages of writing as they learn their alphabet and how to sound out simple words.

We follow writing with maths, where we focus on learning the name, word and value for the numbers below 20. We learn how to draw and read numbers in different ways, such as; tally marks, pictures and number frames.

After morning tea, we have Phonics for 30minutes. This is a differentiated lesson where students can move between the Junior classes depending on their phonics knowledge. In Parekereke we focus on learning the sounds each letter in the alphabet makes. This can take two or three rotations before we have remembered each letter.

While students complete independent learning tasks, I run Guided Reading. Students read with the teacher Monday to Thursday and can choose a familiar story to take home on the Friday.

Somewhere in our week we manage to fit PE, music, library, spelling and assembly too!

Mrs Jessica Simons