Teaching and Learning

Student Learning Experiences

Virtual Writing Workshop

This week 10 level 5 and 6 students got the opportunity to participate in a virtual writing workshop with Renee Treml, a children's author and illustrator. Renée has written and illustrated seven picture books including award-winning Once I Heard a Little Wombat, and Wombat Big, Puggle Small. Our students focused on the writing technique of 'show not tell' by creating visual narratives that had to tell the story without words. All our students were fantastic and excited to share their work online with other students across Victoria.

Maths Olympiad and Maths Games

We have 30 level 5 and 30 level 6 students participating in the Maths Games (L5s) and Maths Olympiad (L6s). This is a problem solving competition that consists of 4 papers. This week saw our students complete their first paper. It was wonderful to see the effort and focus they put into the test.

I wonder how many people out there could solve this question from the Maths Olympiad paper:

Parent Helpers

Thank you to all those parents and guardians who attended the sessions over the last couple of weeks. I now have over 25 registered parents to begin their work in our learning spaces. Our students will benefit greatly from your support, and I know the teachers are excited to have some additional helpers. 

A Google doc will be sent out at the beginning of next week requesting times that people are available to contribute their time and once that is completed we will begin to set up a roster. In the meantime, if you are ready to go, you may speak to your child's classroom teacher and see if they would like some help with their students.

Staff Learning Experiences

Among other things, our staff have been looking closely at some common misunderstandings / misconceptions in mathematics. An example is when students are told to just add or take away a 0 when multiplying or dividing by 10. This results in students lacking a deeper understanding of our place value system which is a base 10 system. When we multiply/divide a number by 10 the number is getting 10 times bigger or smaller. When students understand this idea, they are able to apply this to decimals, e.g. 3.4 x 10 = 34.

Professional Learning Communities

Our staff have used DIBELS data to identify the teaching of reading skills as an area of focus for this term's inquiry cycle. Getting your child to read aloud at home focusing on the use of expression and taking note of punctuation will support the work being done in the classrooms.