Learning and Teaching Update 

Literacy Update; Targeting teaching to cater for student need as we prepare for return to onsite learning.

All things literacy at Fatima have launched straight into a flying start this term. 

Our teachers are responsive educators; aware of the strengths of their students and practiced at planning their teaching to suit each child’s needs. As a result, they’ve been spending lots of time recently administering literacy assessments online so that they have the most up-to-date data for each student. They will analyse the information they gain about each students’ skills to inform their teaching for the term and make sure that they are targeting their teaching to point-of-need. It is great to hear that all our students are engaging so readily and enthusiastically in these crucial online literacy assessments.

Our teachers and families have worked hard to engage our kids during remote learning and cater for their needs. However, we know that although some students thrive when working from home, others find some learning areas more challenging to access and engage. With this in mind, we have been training staff in several new intervention programs to assist students who may need some extra help in their reading, writing and speaking and listening skills when they return to school. 

Some teachers are currently administering new assessments with the purpose of identifying students who may need extra help when they return. We are particularly focused on running intervention programs that improve the phonemic awareness (hearing sounds in words) and decoding skills (being able to accurately read words) of our junior students. These are crucial skills that can be difficult to teach at home but essential for our students to master so they can access the learning at school. 

Over the next couple of weeks, our middle and senior teachers and support teachers are also considering how to support students who are starting to become disengaged in remote learning. They are learning particularly about how to reinvigorate student interest in writing that may have been lost during remote learning; aiming to make writing lessons fun, purposeful, engaging and explicit.

We are so excited to have all our students beginning to return to onsite learning in the coming weeks and are getting as ready as we can to deliver our best practice during the teaching of literacy.

Mary Lenko

Literacy Leader

mlenko@fatimarosebud.catholic.edu.au

Some of our talented students are using their time at home to create, learn the features of a procedural text and to write, write write! Thank you for sharing Chloe, Dimos and Pip!

Inquiry Learning Term 4

This term, we are inquiring into Creativity & Innovation. We will explore how we can use ideas and current technology to make the world around us better.

In preparation for this unit, I inquired into the ways that our school community has been creative and innovative during remote learning. I crafted some questions connected to our big ideas and gathered some examples.

★ Creativity → How has remote learning sparked creativity? 

★ Innovation → How have we changed the way we learn to meet our new needs? 

TERM 4 BIG QUESTIONS