How you can help your child at home

The partnership between home and school is so important, and something that is highly regarded. Research shows how impactful it is when parents are interested in their children's lives, especially school. There are many ways we can all help children, especially at home. Here are some simple, but effective ways to engage with your child/ren in the area of reading.

READING

Talk to your children - talking regularly with your children is crucial in building a wide and varied vocabulary, and confidence with a range of sentence structures. These are necessary to be successful in reading and writing.

Listen to your children - the skills your children are using while putting together ideas, constructing sentences and ordering their thoughts are skills that are also used in the reading process. By doing this you are reinforcing the importance of reading and the rountine.

Praise your children - this is very important. Reading can be hard work, and children need all the encouragement they can get. After all, they are doing the best they can.

Buy books - choose interesting books that will appeal to your individual children, buying them for birthdays, Christmas, or for special treats. Take your children with you when you are browsing in the bookshop and let them choose with you, or allow them to choose books from the school book clubs, book fairs, op shops or markets.

Read in front of your children - when your children see you enjoying books, newspapers and magazines, they follow your example.

Visit your local library regularly - enrol your children, and offer your help in selecting their books, but resist the temptation to impose your choices.

Have a family reading time - put aside half an hour every weekend when all the family enjoy their individual reading matter. Make it a treat, you can even supply something nutritious to nibble on while you read. Book Club has become a popular adult activity across the world, so why not do it at home.

Cook with your children - read the recipe together. Reading, measurement/quantity, time, and time for social discussion. There is a tasty reward at the end of the process.

Read the TV guide, bus timetable or cinema schedule with your children - discuss the options, and plan your viewing ahead - also helps when talking about concepts of time - before, after, tomorrow, yesterday etc.

Go shopping with your children - read the road signs together, notices of any specials in supermarkets, the labels on packets. Give your children a list of things to look for.

Encourage your children to write letters or send emails - write thank you letters or party invitations together.

Encourage them to write a letter to someone - reading and writing go hand in hand.

Play a board game with your children - often such games have lots of fun things to read as well as including maths and strategy eg Monopoly, Uno, Connect Four etc.

Make something with your children - figure out the instructions together. Great for problem solving as well as it ecourages and fosters engineering and design skills.

ICAS Assessments

For those who may have missed this information about ICAS, we have inlcuded this again for you.

Please note - The last day for parents to register for their child’s ICAS participation via your school’s PPS is the 28th July.

What is ICAS? 

ICAS is an online academic competition that gives students the opportunity to challenge their higher order thinking and problem-solving skills in English and Mathematics. ICAS will be offered to students in Levels 3, 4, 5 and 6 at HEPS.

Every student who participates is celebrated and recognised with a printed certificate in each subject area, and an online results report to track development each year. Top performers are eligible for one of the highly coveted ICAS medals.

To learn more about this year’s exciting ICAS competition, visit:  (icasassessments.com/products-icas/)

How to participate in ICAS 

If you wish for your child to participate in ICAS this year, please: 

Read about ICAS subjects and prices here
Read the Privacy Collection Statement below.
Read the terms and conditions here
Go to the Parent Portal to sign up to chosen subject areas here
Enter our school’s access code – VJP382
Enter your child’s details, select the subject areas your child would like to participate in, then proceed to payment.

Please note that the ICAS subject areas shown for selection are at the school’s discretion. After payment is made via the Parent Payment System, you will receive an order confirmation email, please keep this for your records. 

The dates offered for the tests are the dates that will be followed. There will not be any follow up dates and/or plans to accommodate catch up tests. Please consider this as you sign up especially if you have travel plans etc.

ICAS results and certificates

All assessments will be conducted online, at school. We will notify you of the date(s) that we will run ICAS assessments, and when your child’s ICAS results are ready. Your child’s ICAS certificates will be delivered to school. Once we have received them, we will present them to your child to bring home. The back of the certificate will show your child’s ICAS results and the login details, “TAP ID and Pin”. - Use these to enter the Results Portal (orti.icasassessments.com/ortiStudent). Privacy collection statement The following information is a privacy notification about how your child’s data is kept private and secure.

ICAS Assessment is owned by Janison Solutions Pty Ltd (We, Us, Our).To deliver assessment products, Janison will require your child’s School to obtain your consent to provide Janison with certain personal information of students. Janison will collect, store, use, disclose and otherwise deal with such personal information in accordance with its privacy policy (below). We are aware of our responsibility to protect personal information related to children and students from being disclosed when we deliver an ICAS Assessments product. Unless you, as the child’s legal guardian consents, we will not:

collect any personal information or data of children other than the information we need for the successful completion of an assessment, test, or exam.
transfer any personal information we obtain from a child in the delivery of assessments and tests to any jurisdiction outside of Australia.
share any personal information relating to children with any third parties (except for those third parties necessary for us to carry out our Services or provide our Products e.g., medal engraving).
use any personal information or data relating to children for marketing purposes.

You can view our full privacy policy at https://www.janison.com/privacy-policy/.

We may retain personal information and data relevant to a child for their future purposes or for research purposes by Janison for the duration of the school life cycle of the child. However, if you or your child at any time wish to have their personal information or data removed from our systems, they or you may opt out by simply contacting our Privacy Officer at privacy@janison.com or by contacting icasassessments@janison.com.

We are excited to be offering ICAS to our students this year and look forward to celebrating their achievements.

Please do not hesitate to contact Mr Mulder, our High Ability Practice Leader, if you have any questions. 

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