Curriculum

NAPLAN

Our Year 3 and 5 classes have now completed their whole class NAPLAN testing for 2024. There will be a few catch-up sessions running for those students who were absent on the day of a test. As is always the case, we were very proud of the efforts of our students for each of their test sessions. NAPLAN testing runs as smoothly as it can when students come in with a great attitude and try their best and that is what we saw again this year. Later in the year, parents will receive their child’s results, showing performance against other students in the country. 

PLANNING WEEK

As is often the case, the second last week of term is Planning Week. Your children might be coming home reporting that they had all of their specialist classes on one day of the week, while their teachers spent the day collaborating on next term’s planners with their year level team. Why do we do this? 

Research evidence suggests that through collaboration, teachers can work together to achieve a common goal through the sharing of practice, knowledge and problems. Effective collaboration can:

• create a base of knowledge that is distributed among teachers within a school, as opposed to being held by individual teachers
• lead to shared collective responsibility for outcomes across the year level and school.

This means that teachers have opportunities to learn from their colleagues as knowledge and expertise is shared, as well as find shared and multiple solutions to problems of practice. This benefits all students across a year level, not just those in individual classes.

Year level teams will map out an overview of the teaching and learning that will occur through the next term in reading, writing and numeracy. This will be based both on what should be taught at each year level, but also what students need to learn, based on their assessment data. Once term overviews are formed, teams will start mapping out the rich activities that students will complete in each subject area.

During the term, teachers will meet each week to continue their planning, look at new data and investigate new ways of either improving their practice or improving the learning experience for their students.

Rowan Balzary,

Assistant Principal