Queenstown Primary School Learning Centre

Queenstown Primary's Learning Centre has been operating for a number of years. The Centre provides extra tuition in many curriculum areas for many children.

Teacher Aides are trained to provide high quality tuition for children who require extra support, to enable them to reach their potential.

Our forward-looking BOT provides substantial funding each year for staff, professional development, and the purchase and implementation of new programmes. The PTA also provide funding for resources to enable programmes to run efficiently.

Programmes Operating Presently:

Steps Programme:
This is a comprehensive NZ Literacy tool suitable for learners of all ages.

'Steps to Literacy' and 'First Steps' are remedial literacy courses. The courses are highly structured, multi-sensory, and suitable for learners with processing difficulties such as dyslexia, and for learners who just need more structure and reinforcement.

Both courses actively develop the processing skills involved in literacy, including phonological awareness, visual and auditory memory and tracking.

ELL Groups:
Presently 10 English Language Learner groups operate in the Learning Centre, where children with English as a second language receive tuition daily. Our ELL children come from many different countries from throughout the world. Some arrive with a little spoken English, while others have next to nothing. These children spend 1 - 2 weeks in their classrooms before coming to the Learning Centre, to enable them to build friendships, and become familiar with the school surroundings. Most progress quickly once formal lessons begin.

Maths Group:
A number of senior children meet daily for extra tuition on basic facts and number work, predominantly at Stage 4 and 5 levels.

Numbershark:
Numbershark is a programme to help anyone improve numeracy. It addresses many of the difficulties that lead students to dislike maths, including poor short term memory, attention span and sequencing skills.

The programme features over 50 different games to teach and reinforce numeracy in ways which add meaning and understanding to numbers. The games are played with your chosen units of work (topics) each of which generates a new set of 'sums' every time you play the game.

Social Skills:
A programme for children who need support in relating to, and working alongside other children. This is held three days a week, with a focus on making and maintaining friends.

Multilit - Making up Lost Time in Literacy:
This programme is a 1-1 programme, which most Teacher Aides are proficient in delivering. Children have a daily 15 to 20 minute lesson, which includes a work attack session and a basic sight word session. The majority of children make excellent progress within this programme.

Wordshark:
Wordshark is a programme to help children read and spell. It includes 55 games and 9000 pre-recorded words intensive individual or small group model.

Therapy focuses on:
Phonological Awareness
Phonological awareness training affects phonological awareness ability, speech production and literacy development in children with spoken language impairment. Development of skills is focused at the phoneme level and phonological awareness activities are integrated with letter sound knowledge training.

Other Targeted Areas
Other areas addressed in speech language therapy sessions include basic concepts and following directions, word and sentence structure, recall, receptive and expressive language development, sequencing and word classes, vocabulary and associations.