Learning & Teaching

Learning and Teaching encompasses the following areas: Student Outcomes, Curriculum, Assessment, Reporting, Principles and Pedagogy.

L & T AND LITERACY - Vira Pirrotta

In the last few issues of the newsletter, I have focussed on reading with your child at home, in this issue I would like to focus on some writing tips and ideas.

How to encourage your child to write at home

Books are a great model of what great writing looks like. They help children learn and make sense of how written language works.

It is difficult for children to write about unfamiliar topics or topics that are irrelevant to their life experiences. Therefore, it is a great idea to either read a book or talk about a topic to help your child generate thoughts and ideas. Writing about familiar events topics or using writing in their everyday life is a great starting point for parents.

Encouraging your child and providing opportunities to write home can be easy. Here are some great ways to engage your child in writing:

letting them help write a shopping list
sending letters and cards to friends and relations
writing emails to family or friends
keeping a diary or journal about their day
labelling photos in the family album or scrapbook
writing and leaving notes or reminders for family members
recording events on a family calendar
writing stories for siblings
using writing apps such as notes, Book Creator, google docs or slides or PowerPoint or Microsoft Word
making books about their favourite topics like animals, Minecraft or footy
making lists of jobs or tasks for the week
book reviews about the book they are reading to share with their friends
playing writing games, for example, one person writes the beginning, another the middle and another the ending of a sentence or story.

These everyday writing tasks help children understand that writing is relevant and meaningful rather than it being a long process. These ideas will help your child engage in writing tasks and give them an opportunity to succeed as writers.

Next week we will look at the process of writing and how parents can support their children through the stages of writing.

Happy Writing!

NUMERACY - Colleen Monaghan

Ways to Help Your Kids with Mathematics

Avoid admitting that you're bad at math. Stay positive! ...
Talk about mathematics . ...
Frame this moment as a chance for kids to explore whatever math question interests them. ...
Have your child teach you maths. ...
Try the new maths. ...
Do away with “drill and kill.” ...
Take it slow.

Foundation students are working on the 5 facts - what makes five? They know how to play rock Paper scissors and find out the five facts. Play a game with your Foundation student.

Year 1/2 students are working on the tens facts – what makes ten? They are also playing rock paper scissors and can find out the ten facts. Play a game with your Junior students.

The 3/4 students are beginning to work on their times table facts. Year 3 students need to know their 2,5,10 and 3 times tables by the end of the year. The Year 4 students need to know all of the table facts to 10 by the end of the year.

We are working with them on strategies to help them learn these facts. Once we learn the tables and the commutativity property, these become easier to learn.

1 times table is the number itself

2 times table is double each number

3 times table is double plus one more

4 times table is double, double

5 times table is half of 10 times

6 times table is 5 times plus one more of the number

8 times table is double, double and double again

9 times table is 10 times table less one of the number

10 times table is number moved over a place value place

7 times table – only one they need to learn is 7x7=49

Year 5/6 students are also working on the automatic recall of their table facts. When these aren’t in place it makes all computations with multiplication, division, area and volume really difficult to do.

SPORT & PE - Michael Jennings

SSV Coburg District Sport Competition

Round 3 of the SSV Coburg District Sports Competition was held on Friday 11 March 2022. Our teams played against Pascoe Vale South Primary School. Once again, congratulations to our softball, basketball and bat tennis teams. They continue to display great enthusiasm and teamwork. Keep up the effort and positive attitude!

Results:

Boys Softball

St Fidelis 14 runs was defeated by PVS 15 runs

Girls Softball

St Fidelis 14 runs defeated PVS 13 runs