Teaching & Learning  

Well Done to all the Year 3 and Year 5 students for their participation in NAPLAN over the last 2 weeks.   I want to acknowledge the students' efforts;  praising their hard work.

It ran very smoothly and I extend this thank-you to the teachers who administered the tests, Miss Khammy, Miss Cat and Mrs Jones for her organisation. 

The Prep and Year 1/2 classrooms have developed strong literacy practices informed by evidenced based researched into how to teach students to read.  We continue to use the program PLD - Promoting Literacy Development as our foundation for assessment and planning and have revised our instructional practice with very explicit instruction with timely feedback throughout the lessons focussing on phonics and word knowledge, handwriting and developing fluent readers. 

The Year 3/4 & 5/6 classrooms continue to embed phonics instruction through their daily PLD spelling program at the beginning of each day.  There is a strong emphasis on the teaching of phonics (sounds in words: digraphs, trigraphs), spelling rules, Semantics, Word Meaning and fluency.  The students work towards applying their knowledge of phonics and new vocabulary into their writing. 

Our mathematics instructional practice continues to have an emphasis on developing students with skills and strategies to solve challenging problems.  Students are scaffolded and supported with explicit teaching and provided with opportunities to share their thinking with their peers. 

Students in prep attend our ‘Discovery Learning Room’ where they engage in play based activities that are specifically designed to promote the growth of children’s physical, cognitive, language and social-emotional needs.  Students are explicitly taught how to interact positively with each other and form relationships.  Play provides an opportunity for students to learn to express their needs and wants, manage their emotions and develop empathy for others.  Students are stimulated by planned experiences to encourage the development of language and literacy skills as well as opportunities to strengthen their fine motor skills. 

This term our students have been learning about  our community, rules and laws & democracy.  Students in Years 1 - 6 engage in our student led inquiry program where students are active participants in the thinking and learning process.  They form their own questions, plan and implement ways of finding information and use these experiences to build answers to their questions. Inquiry learning is a student-centred approach prioritised by students taking an active role.  Students are immersed into the inquiry through hands-on activities and develop knowledge through exploration.  This may include excursions, guest speakers, interviews, experiments etc.   The teacher scaffolds students' thinking and provides tools and resources to guide the learning.  Students gather data and challenge ideas, beliefs and values.  They justify, form viewpoints and decide on ways to present their learning in print, oral, visual or use of multimedia devices.