Teaching & Learning

Hi Teesdale Primary School families!

My name is Mrs Reshae Martin (you might remember me as Miss Armstrong), and I’m excited to be stepping into the role of Learning Specialist – Teaching and Learning this year. I’ve been teaching at Teesdale for the past six years, and after getting married over the holidays, I’m thrilled to be back at school and ready for another great year.

Home Reading – A Big Focus for 2026 📚This year, we’re placing a big whole school focus on reading at home. Reading regularly at home plays a huge role in building strong reading skills and growing children’s language and vocabulary. In fact, children need to be exposed to around 2,000–3,000 new words each year to really support their learning and future success.

Reading doesn’t have to happen straight after school — families can choose a routine that works best for you. This might be before school, in the evening, or even spread out over the weekend. 

Our home reading expectations are:

• Foundation and Junior School: reading the take home decodable reader, daily
• Middle and Senior School: 20 minutes of reading at home, daily 

When students read and record their reading in their school diaries each day, they’ll earn extra school tokens too! 

Reading Intervention Groups – What’s Changing

In previous years, our Tutor Learning Initiative, funded by the Victorian Government, allowed Mrs Wells and Mrs Teague to work with small groups of students on important reading skills like phonics and decoding. While this funding has now finished, we know this work is still really important. This year, we’ll be continuing reading intervention groups a little differently by using our amazing Inclusion Team members. They will run small group reading sessions throughout the day. If your child will be part of a reading intervention group this year, your child’s classroom teacher will give you a phone call over the coming week with more details.

Happy learning! 

Mrs Martin  

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