Curriculum Updates

Pupil Free Day – New Learning for Teachers

Last week, our teachers and ES staff took part in Professional Learning on the new English Curriculum and Victoria’s Approach to Teaching Reading. 

We unpacked the new curriculum, comparing it to the previous version, noting changes and new inclusions. As next year is the first year of the implementation phase, we will look to evaluate our current Curriculum Maps and Instructional Models over the course of the year. 

We unpacked different reading theories and learnt about the Big 6 of Reading, which is what Victoria’s Approach to Reading is based on – oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. 

We learnt about Reading Fluency strategies such as Choral, Echo, Repeated and Cloze reading and how they can be used to improve students’ accuracy, pace and expression when reading aloud. Both Ms Petzke and I have trialled these methods and shared a video with staff to observe the strategies in practice. 

Teachers also worked on text selection and how high-quality texts can be used in reading and writing instruction across all year levels. 

It was a big day but puts us all in good stead for implementing the new approach over the next few years. 

Maths at Home

Here are some open ended maths questions and problem solving tasks to work on at home!

• I have 5 coins. Three are the same. How much money do I have?

How many ways can you solve it? How many different strategies can you show your answer with?

• Imagine your family agreed to give you some pocket money every day for a month! You can choose from the following options:

1. $10 every day
2. $3 on the first day, $3.50 on the second, $4 on the third, and so on, increasing by 50p per day
3. 1c on the first day, 2c on the second, 4c on the third, and so on, doubling each day.

Which one would you choose, and why?