Assistant Principal Curriculum and Instruction

Dear Parents and Carers,

This fortnight, I have been very busy both in and out of the classroom working with teachers and students. I am so lucky to work with colleagues who generously open up their classrooms and allow me to work alongside them and to work with students who are engaged and positive. It is also inspiring to collaborate with teachers to plan units of work for English and Mathematics that best meet the needs of our students.

Teaching Writing in 2G and 2H

Last week, I had a ball working with 2G and Mrs Guinery, and 2H and Miss Hart teaching writing. We collaboratively designed a sequence of lessons to develop students’ use of descriptive language focusing on noun groups (adjectives that describe nouns). These lessons were based on a book called Great White Shark by Claire Saxby. Students had a great time composing noun groups about sharks, octopuses and seahorses. It was so rewarding to see how quickly the students applied this new understanding to their own writing about seals which they first had to research.

Developing Reading Fluency with Stage 3

Last Friday I began working on developing reading fluency with 6H and 5/6B. First, we built a shared understanding of the components of fluency which showed me just how much the students have already learned after teachers selected this as a focus for Term 2. Then, students worked on paired fluency and giving constructive feedback to each other on accuracy, pace, expression and intonation (using punctuation cues) to improve fluency. I look forward to working with 5F, 5H and 6R this Friday and then with Stage 2 over the remainder of the term!

Collaborative Programming with Stage 1

When teachers plan a unit of work, they need to consider three things: 1. teaching (what they are going to teach), 2. learning (how they are going to teach it) and 3. assessing (when and how to measure student understanding). This is a mammoth task and with the huge amounts of resources available, it can be hard to know where to start. This fortnight, it has been such a pleasure to have had the time to sit with colleagues and dive into programming together. The wealth of ideas and knowledge amongst our teachers is incredible and you know what they say… two heads are better than one! Even better are the Mathematics and English teaching, learning and assessing activities that we are planning for Term 3!

APC&I “Shout Out”

Congratulations to Ms James and 3/4J for their work on the Number Detective activity I challenged classes to last week. Students had to think creatively, use reasoning skills and problem-solving strategies to find the mystery number following the clues below:

The number has two digits.

Both of the digits are even.

The digit in the tens place is greater that the digit in the ones place.

The ones digit is not in the three times table.

The tens digit is not double the ones digit.

The sum of the two digits is a multiple of five.

They got 64 and 82!

Warm regards,

Emily Chatterton