Term 4 Student-Free Day

Valkstone Primary will be having one more student-free day in Term 4. I look forward to sharing our learnings with you in upcoming newsletters, after these days.

(Angela Dawson - Principal)

OSHC will be available on this date.

Teacher Professional Learning Day - Monday December 4th 

Each year school councils may schedule up to 5 student-free days (when student instruction does not occur) for professional development, school planning and administration, curriculum development and student assessment and reporting.

Based on goals from within Valkstone's 4 year Strategic Plan, we have secured Literacy Consultant Narissa Leung, who will be working with us on developing a consistent school-wide approach to teaching and learning in Writing. Riss is passionate about helping to make sure that every child gets access to the highest quality literacy instruction because she believes that literacy opens doors. 

We will be focusing on developing our understanding of 6+1 Writing Traits, in particular:

• Learning the qualities of good writing - Going beyond the basics of each of the 6+1 traits. We will slow down and learn about one trait at a time.
   
• Learning how to use mentor texts to teach writing - We will learn how rich mentor texts are pulled apart to be used with students. We will learn how to reuse the same text for different teaching points.
   
• Learning how to identify the strengths and weaknesses in student writing - We will build our knowledge of all the things that you can look for and give feedback on in student writing.

Our learning will also go beyond the key qualities and show them to use in Australian mentor texts and Australian students' writing.