The Anchor

Primary School

Waste-audit incursions, icy-poles, leadership days, our first too-hot-to-play-outside lunch and adventures outside have all been highlights of Primary School this week. A big thank you to Mr and Mrs Irving for the cold treats on Tuesday’s scorching day. Today, our Year Six students are learning all about leadership down at the boarding house. We are looking forward to seeing where their Anchor Award service takes them this year and the fun House activities, we will all be involved in. I look forward to seeing many families at our first P&F Meet and Greet BBQ in the ECC swings playground after school tomorrow.

 

Please don’t forget tomorrow is our first House activities afternoon and students are invited to wear their sport uniform and House shirts for the day.  

Culture, Engagement and Excellence

The evidence-based programmes run in our Primary School are carefully selected to maximise student engagement and promote academic excellence. To create a culture of this, teachers are consistently employing teaching strategies to maximise student engagement within our programmes.

Cognitive Load Theory

As a self-confessed nerd of this theory, I have driven thousands of kilometres listening to podcasts on this topic, that is so relevant to the little people in our care. Dylan Wiliam has described cognitive load theory as ‘the single most important thing for teachers to know’. An evidenced-based theory, cognitive load theory provides support for explicit models of instruction. As a basic definition, cognitive load theory is a theory of how human brains learn and store knowledge. We can only access around four chunks of short-term memory at one time. If we overload this, students will not understand what is being taught and there will be no long-term retention. You may experience this in action trying to get ready for school: if you dish out too many instructions, you often find yourself presented with a half-dressed child or a half-packed school bag or – worse, children have forgotten you told them how they were getting home. 

 

To combat this at school, we deliver new topics via explicit instruction, reduce the cognitive load with our teaching strategies, utilise Daily Review, follow the ‘I do, we do, you do’ gradual release model of instruction and evaluate the easiest way to deliver the outcome we intend for students to learn, so it can make it to their long-term memory. 

 

Our Wild Space is a wonderful tool for this. Many lessons can be done outside, hands-on, reducing the cognitive load of sitting at a desk, ruling up, holding a pencil, ignoring the distractions of the classroom and forming letters and numbers. Last week I had the privilege of teaching in Year One on a sunny morning. Students were required to practise their spelling sounds and skip-counting using arrays in fives and tens. After an eventful morning and a long week of learning as little people, the learning was far more advantageous in this setting.

 

See below their collaborative effort to get to 100 shells followed by individual and group efforts to write their spelling words and count in fives and tens with their own collections in arrays. The discussions of how arrays made it easier to count were fabulous and they all enjoyed their crunch and sip with a view and crab finding as a reward for their efforts. 

Waste Audit Incursion – Year Four

Last Friday, Clean-Away visited our Year Four classes as part of our inquiry learning into sustainability. With the assistance of Clean-Away, the Year Four students upended our waste bins and audited our rubbish!

 

A waste audit is a fun learning activity and research tool, which can be used to find out:

• the types of waste produced by your school

• the amount of waste produced by your school.

 

Students collected waste from the general waste bins and sorted it into specific categories to see the amount and types of waste going to landfill.

 

We hope to inspire our Year Four students to create an inquiry project to interact with the following inquiry statement: ‘We can avoid, recover and protect against unnecessary waste in our community.’ They will then present this as a culminating task in the Year Four Sustainability Expo at the end of the term. 

 

Well done to Year Four, and Miss Gracie Laneaux-Neale and Mrs Lisa Keatch for organising. 

School Values – Compassion

With compassion being our school values focus this fortnight, our Year Six Leaders shared with the students ways we can show compassion. Compassion means showing concern for others. Well done to our students who received values awards for compassion this week.

 

Kindergarten – Rosie Paton

Pre-Primary – Kobi Finaughty

Year Two – Dane Pyle 

 

We spoke about showing compassion especially in the heat we were having. Mrs Ranger commended our ECC students on the way they have been doing this with each other and the school.

 

ECC Stars of the Week – on display in the ECC foyer 

Kindergarten – Oscar Weatherill 

Pre-Primary – Teddy Davison

Year One – Emily Hicks 

Year Two – Hamish Field

 

Years Three to Six Briefing

The value of the week was compassion. The following students were recognised for demonstrating compassion throughout the week. 

 

Year Three – Gwen Elliott

Year Four L – Edward Yeboah 

Year Four K – Sadie Cameron

Year Five – Samantha Cooper 

Year Six G – Kate Levett 

Year Six N – Mia Palmer

 

The 'Brag Award' this week was won by the industrious efforts of Year Six G for demonstrating the best wearing of school uniform during the week. Well done, Year Six G!

Upcoming Events - Week Four

Friday 23 February

  • House Activities afternoon (all Primary School students to wear their sport uniform including their House shirt.) 
  • P&F Primary School BBQ in the ECC swings playground, 3.00pm to 4.30pm

Upcoming Events - Week Five

Monday 26 February

  • Principal’s Commissioning (full presentation uniform for Years Three to Six) in the Multi-Purpose Sport Complex, 10.15am

Wednesday 28 February

  • NAPLAN practice test (Years Three, Five, Seven and Nine), 9.00am

Thursday 29 February

  • Tour Morning, 9.00am to 11.00am

Friday 1 March

  • Year Six G Class Assembly in the Hall, 2.20pm

Have a wonderful weekend, 

 

Ms Leah Field | Head of Primary