From the Deputy Principal

Spelling

Teachers spent time on Tuesday afternoon in an extended professional learning session about spelling, with Lisa Burman, online.

Lisa is an education consultant who has worked closely with the teachers of St Paul for a number of years regarding literacy practices. Her passion for literacy is infectious and we are lucky to be continuing with an extensive partnership agreement again this year.

When you don't know how to spell a word, what strategies do you use? How did you learn to spell? Were you taught, like most of us in Australia, to learn to memorise words over the course of the week and then take a test on Friday? If this was your experience at school, it's not how you learned to spell the words you know today.

“We don’t learn to spell words by heart. There are around 250,000 words in the English language in relatively common usage, and many of us know close to 60,000 of those words. We didn’t learn to spell those words through rote learning. We didn’t even learn them in those Friday morning spelling tests, because that would have been 6,000 tests, over about 150 years of schooling, assuming we had a perfect score every time.” Misty Adoniou.

The word inquiry approach at St Paul promotes an investigative approach to the English language. It incorporates reading and writing to provide contextual learning, and dovetails with other approaches to language development such as phonics. At St Paul we aim for children to be armed with a multitude of strategies and skills to attack a word with confidence when they are unsure how to spell it.

"Good spellers take risks and attempt new words. Good spellers are also interested in words and try to do their best, always being aware that their writing needs to be easily read by others. Good spellers also use different strategies to try words, and they use resources such as books, word lists, dictionaries and word books to check their spelling.” Diane Snowball & Faye Bolton.

We look forward to renewing and developing new knowledge with Lisa as the year goes on.

Parent Welcome Evenings

At this time of year we are normally preparing for Parent Welcome Evenings. As with most things, we have placed these type of gatherings on hold. However, we are currently considering what these evenings could look like in a COVID-safe way, as we understand and appreciate that these evenings are an important way to connect and develop community. 

We are hoping to share the details regarding a modified format for Parent Welcome evenings by the end of this week. As always with events, it may not be possible for everyone to attend. Please feel free to reach out to your child's teacher via phone or email if this is the case to introduce yourself and have a chat about how your child has started the year.

Parent teacher interviews are slated for Week 11 later this term, and we are hoping these will be able to take place face to face to continue connecting about your child.

School Tours

School tours will continue to take place in a COVID-safe way this term. If you know anyone who would like to learn more about enrolling at St Paul, please ask them to contact our new registrar Monique Tabuena at mtabuena@stpaulba.sa.edu.au. This is particularly important for 2023 enrolments. 

School tours are being personalised for individual families at present and more information about set times can be found at  http://www.stpaulba.sa.edu.au/enrolment/school-tours. If these times do not suit Monique can arrange a time to suit individual needs.

Jason Fay | Deputy Principal