Our Ako (Teaching and Learning)

We are a full primary school catering for students from Year 0 to Year 8. We provide a well balanced curriculum to meet the social, emotional, academic and physical needs of our students. We have approximately 229 students across 10 learning spaces.

We have developed a local curriculum to reflect the unique Central Otago life we all love, and learn in. 

Our local curriculum is the way that we bring The New Zealand Curriculum to life at our school. We aim to:

• be responsive to the needs, identity, language, culture, interests, strengths and aspirations of our learners and their families; 

• have a clear focus on what supports the progress of all learners; 

• integrate Te Tiriti o Waitangi into our learning; 

• help our learners engage with and develop knowledge, values, and competencies, so they can go on and be confident and connected lifelong learners.

At APS we are ensuring that structured literacy is a critical component of our effective literacy practices. We begin with using the LLLL (Little Learners Love Literacy) programme which has a specific sequence and structure for teaching reading (decoding) and spelling (encoding). We also acknowledge that a rich oral language environment is important for the approach to be effective and for ākonga (learners) to thrive.

We use Liz Kane's 'The Code' for our Year 3-8 ākonga. It includes explicit and systematic teaching of phonemic awareness, the alphabetic principle, and spelling and morphology.

This year (2024) we have been working with other local schools to build our teaching pedagogy in maths through professional development with Rob Proffitt-White (The Learner First Maths).

We encourage whānau members to talk to their child's kaiako (teacher) at any time about their learning.