Assistant Principal's Report

Leasyl Richards - Curriculum

5 June 2020

ASSESSMENT

We thank parents for ensuring that your child’s learning continued over the last few months while we learnt from home. We acknowledge that with very short notice you had to juggle your own work lives (which shifted to working from home), set up areas in the home to provide ideal learning environments, provided support of your children in keeping their learning going and balanced the running of your household with managing your child’s academic and wellbeing needs.  Thank you for persisting when times got tough, and for continuing to facilitate student’s learning. The teachers very much appreciate the work you have done. 

Many of you have spoken to me about the insights you gained about how your child learns and about their academic strengths and areas they require further work. Our teachers are looking forward to the parent teacher interviews in the last week of term to share with you and to enable you to share your insights with the class teachers.

Teachers are highly skilled in adapting their programs to cater for the varying degrees of learning abilities in their classrooms to enable their programs to be differentiated. Part of the assessments we have been doing cater for the diverse range of abilities. With our learning from home program it has been harder for teachers to differentiate and teachers are very keen to have the students back in their classes. 

As part of our return to school for Prep -year 2 students and in preparation of our return to school for Year 3-6 students, teachers have been conducting 1:1 assessments to assist them with knowing exactly where students are achieving in order to know where our starting point is for resuming learning from school.

The assessments that teachers have been conducting at the moment are 

Reading assessments for all students in Prep-6.  These reading assessments are conducted individually with each child and provide teachers with information on children’s decoding skills, fluency and comprehension.

Maths assessments for all students in Prep- 6. 

The Maths Online Interview is used by teachers in Prep – Year 4. It is conducted individually with each child and involves teachers working through a set list or questions that progress through various levels of mathematical abilities. Areas covered in this assessment are Counting, Place Value, Addition and Subtraction, Multiplication and Division. This year our Year 2’s are also undertaking the Time assessments.

Utilising the Essential Assessment online testing program is another tool that we use in Year 2-6. This is an online tool that gives teachers information in all areas of maths providing teachers with detailed information about student’s strengths and areas of need. 

PREMIERS READING CHALLENGE

Our updated total for the 5th of June

19% of students have completed the Challenge (126 students)

Congratulations to the Year 4 students who are continuing to lead the way with 29 students completed.  The Year 2 (24 students) and the Year 5 (23 students) are hot on their heels. 

We have read 9278 books! 

If you are unsure about how to log books onto the Challenge website please contact one of the Premiers Reading Challenge team

leasyl.richards@education.vic.gov.au

lamia.bouazza@education.vic.gov.au

victoria.bruges-cannon@education.vic.gov.au

melise.gurpinar@education.vic.gov.au

sandra.mazzocca@education.vic.gov.au

SUSTAINABILITY

We are continuing to embed our Sustainable practices at Wheelers Hill Primary School. Many of you have been commenting on how clean our school yard is at the moment and really want to continue to take pride in keeping the yard like this. Our school community can help us by trying really hard to limit the amount of wrapping in our lunchboxes. 

Leasyl Richards

richards.leasyl.a@edumail.vic.gov.au