Teaching and Learning

Gateways Program - An Opportunity for High Achievers

As part of our goal to improve opportunities for our high achieving students, we have been looking into enrichment programs that we can offer to students and families. Gateways is a long-established organisaiton that provides ongoing and once-off challenge days that schools can nominate students to attend. As we are just dipping our toes in the water with this, we have identified an upcoming once-off challenge day focussing on high achievers in writing in Years 4-6. Details about the content of the program here.

How does the system work?

Using our writing data we will be shortlisting students in Years 4-6 who we may consider nominating for the Gateways writing challenge day. If teachers agree with the nominations we will send information home to students' parents, who decide whether to accept or decline the nomination. If parents accept the nomination there is a fee for students to participate in the challenge day, this must be covered by parents and will not be covered by the school. The challenge day will be held at Parkhill Primary School on 30 May and parents/ carers must arrange transport to and from Parkhill on the day of the event.

What is required of teachers?

Not much. Kim will be in touch with Year 4-6 English teachers with a list of possible students for nomination. A quick conversation to confirm who should be nominated is all that will be needed, Kim will arrange all the communication with parents etc.

If you would like further information about Gateways and the programs they offer see Kim or visit the Gateways website.

SWPBS Update

Challenge: Most incidents are occurring on Thursdays and in Le Jardin. At the moment the majority of these incidents are described as physical abuse.
Management:
- Those teachers on duty in Le Jardin, please maintain active supervision whilst on duty; walking around, monitoring and checking in with students during play. We are aware that the duty teachers on this day have the added challenge of being solo during this time. If a CRT or extra staff member is available they will be placed here as a priority.
- Classroom teachers, please review expectations around playing in Le Jardin, including fair play on the soccer field, safe use of the slide, and expectations for the dome. Please encourage your students to see the Yard Duty teacher if they have a challenge in the yard, so that the incident can be managed in the moment.
- Check-out and Check-in with students about safe hands and safe feet before and after play.
The SWPBS team will meet again in Week 7 and provide an update about whether we have achieved our goal of reducing Thursday play time incidents. MERCI!
Following the Telopea Park School resources as a template, we have developed a wheel of options to assist students in independently solving conflicts. Please have a look and print off to share with your classes.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1734k1Qjh4W2LzjnPjx4V42BQU4heQ-Bl

AE, NW, AM, MD & SM

Preliminary NAPLAN data results

We have received our preliminary data which provides each student's results in a guttman chart format. This has been uploaded to SPA for your perusal.

You will find this data by going in to SPA

From the SSSR Cohort tab provides an overview of how we did with each item.

From the SSR Individual tab we can see the individual student results.

When you click on the ZPD (zone of proximal development - showing which skills and concepts students do know and which they are ready to learn).

If you click on an item in purple, you can see which students were successful on the item and which made an error in their response and who did not attempt it. If many students got the answer wrong, then it would be interesting to know whether you have taught that skill or not.

Remember that the test was adaptive, so if students showed that they were answering consistently correctly, they would then jump to another level.

Poetry competition

As you know, we have 2 separate competitions of poetry recitation.

-Berthe Mouchette Competition: optional, students and parents could choose if they wanted to partitipate or not.

The assessment will be conducted on Zoom, in the AP's offices on Tuesday the 20th of May from 9am to 11.20 am (it will continue during recess and if you could tell the students who will unfortunately miss a bit of recess, that would be great... Apologies...)

An assistant will come and grab the enrolled students to recite and they will come back when the are done. (10 minutes tops)

Please find the list of partitipants here and their time of assessment.

Action: Can I ask you to put where to find the students at their time of assessment in column F? ex: Marilyne's room or Music...

Reminds students they can also submit a drawing to illustrate their poem, it is another chance to win.

-CPS/KHPS competition: same poems for the 2 competitions.

In Week 7: (2nd to 6th of June): competition in class: All students recite the poem and one finalist per class is chosen.

Teachers record the finalist and upload the video for KHPS to assess.

I will remind you of the process closer to WK7.

Reconciliation Week (27 May - 3 June)

This week is book-ended by 2 significant dates for Australia. The anniversaries of the successful 1967 Referendum and the High Court Mabo land rights decision. What a great opportunity to teach our students about the importance of these events and discuss what reconciliation may look like moving forward. Please consider including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and perspectives in your planning (always, but especially during this week.)

If anyone finds any useful resources, I encourage you to share these in the next few briefing notes.