TEACHING AND LEARNING

These past two weeks have seen more fantastic learning happening across the school. 

In  Prep, students have been working very hard on their writing skills. They are taking their letter and sound knowledge and applying this to their writing. The Preps have been writing text types such as narratives, procedural texts, and expositions. Their most recent exposition was a persuasive piece about why everyone should visit a zoo, linked to their excursion to Werribee Zoo earlier in Week 8. It is amazing to think that at the beginning of the year most students couldn’t write much at all, and now they are writing persuasive, informative, and entertaining compositions. 

Last term, the Year Prep and Year 1/2 teachers took part in an eight-week training to learn all about teaching the Sounds Write program at Lucas Primary School. Sounds Write is a phonics-based program that teaches students the foundational skills of reading and writing, including segmenting, blending, and phoneme manipulation. The teachers invested a great deal of their time to engage in this learning and the 1/2 classes have been putting it into action this term in their 20-minute Spelling block each day. The students have picked up the routines so quickly and are already expanding their reading and writing skills. 

In Integrated Studies this term, the Year 3/4 students have been learning about sustainability. They have been linking this topic into their Reading and Writing lessons. This week, the students were excited to write an exposition about why it is important to act sustainably at school and at home. They have linked their arguments to the “Big Ideas” discussing why sustainability is important for our health, friends and family, education, entertainment, and money. It is amazing to see the high modality words students are incorporating into their writing such as “you must” instead of “you should”, or “it is certain that” instead of “I think”.