English News
English News
MS Readathon
Congratulations to our students in the MS Readathon who are in the final week and who have raised $685 dollars so far, they have read a total of 57 books! It’s not too late to donate to the students participating, visit: https://www.msreadathon.org.au/fundraisers/stpatrickscatholicprimaryschoolsutherland
Keep up the great reading!
Congratulations to Nestor (Year 3P) and Sophie (Year 4N) who are progressing to the State Finals of the Prime Minister’s Spelling Bee, we wish you the best of luck!
A Huge thank you to all students who participated in the St Patrick’s Great Book Swap!
We raised $320 on the day that will go to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation and we have a $30 donation online from one of our families which is fantastic! If you would like to support us in this cause you can donate to our Book Swap Fundraising page here: https://edu.greatbookswap.org.au/stpatrickssutherlandgreatbookswap
Book Week and the Newman Symposium
Thank you to all students and their families for supporting our Book Week and Newman Symposium events. We have many talented Readers, Singers, Musicians, Actors, Dancers, Scientists, ICT Experts, Mathematicians and Public Speakers at our school and it was fantastic to be able to acknowledge and share their talents.
🏆 Congratulations to our Marilyn Cosgrove Award Winner: Patrick H
All classes in Years 3-6 are currently trialling the Sounds Waves Spelling program. Sound Waves follows a logical and thorough scope and sequence.
The program is organised around the 43 phonemes (sounds) of Australian English and the graphemes (a letter or letter combination) used to represent them in written language.
Informed by research on the best practices for teaching spelling, the program incorporates four key areas of teaching:
Phonemic awareness: the ability to work with phonemes.
Synthetic phonics: phonics instruction that involves teaching phoneme–grapheme relationships.
Morphology: knowledge of the meaningful parts of words: prefixes, suffixes, and Greek and Latin roots.
Etymology: understanding of word origins and history.
K-2 Phonics Update
This week we have been learning………….
Kindergarten /th (hard/soft)/ as in thin, moth, thank
Year 1 /ie igh i-e y/ as in pie, tie, light, kite, fly
Year 2 /Alternate spellings n- kn r-wr m-mb/ as in knight, wrap, crumb, limb, phone, graph
Next week we will be learning…………
Kindergarten /CVCC/ as in bent, sent, tent, went, bump and jump
Year 1 /or aw a/ as in born, corn, saw, small, wall
Year 2 /ch tch/ as in teacher, screech, match, kitchen
IMPORTANT DECODABLE TEXTS ANNOUNCEMENT
The purpose of decodable texts is for students to practise the phonemes (sounds) they are learning in class. It is imperative when reading decodable texts that they are only reading a book with the sounds that they have been taught.
We have been made aware of some families purchasing their own personal subscriptions to the Decodable Readers Australia Website so that they can read and unlock any books that they want. We are requesting that you please refrain from doing this. If students are reading texts that they are not ready for (have not learnt the sound) students will revert to strategies such as guessing and looking at the picture to read words. This will actually slow the orthographic mapping process down and can impact the reading progress negatively.
Teachers spend a lot of time assessing their students fluency, accuracy and pace on a specific sound set. Please trust their judgement on when your child is ready to progress to the next sound set level. Teachers are always happy to meet with parents to discuss any concerns or questions you may have around reading.
Some tips when responding to errors
When children are reading at home they may make the following errors: guess a word, have blending difficulties, decode words incorrectly or just stop and do nothing. Please see the flyer below for some tips on how to encourage your child when this might occur.
Mrs Kimberlee Hill and Mrs Kate Gill- English Coordinators