Learning and Teaching
Daily Reviews
As part of the MACS Vision for Instruction, regular review is considered an essential element of the explicit instruction sequence. Regular review places an emphasis on students rehearsing and reviewing information to create stronger connections and make prior knowledge more readily available for use.
What are Daily Reviews?
A Daily Review is a teaching strategy that involves regularly revisiting previously taught material to reinforce learning and improve retention. It is a structured process where students review key concepts, skills, or content that they have covered in class. It is an effective way to counter the forgetting curve, which demonstrates that memories tend to fade without regular reinforcement.
What are the benefits of a Daily Review?
The key benefits of implementing a daily review include:
Reinforcement: It helps reinforce key concepts, skills, and knowledge, reducing the likelihood of forgetting.
Retrieval practice: It engages students in actively retrieving information from memory, which enhances their ability to recall and apply that knowledge in the future.
Confidence-building: Regular review gives students a sense of mastery and confidence in their understanding of the subject matter.
Identification of gaps: Through the review process, teachers can identify areas where students may need additional support or reteaching.
Daily reviews in literacy differ across the school. In Prep, students review letter sounds and practice blending and segmenting. In Year 1 and 2, students review alternative spellings of sounds, read and spell words, read and spell tricky words and take part in dictation that includes the alternative spellings and new words. They also review grammar concepts and vocabulary.
When we move to the middle and upper levels, the students review sounds and words, morphology, engage in vocabulary retrieval practice and review grammar that they have learnt previously.
In Maths, students engage in counting and review of concepts taught to them across the year. Our engagement with the resources from Ochre for Mathematics has enabled a consistent approach to daily reviews across the school in Mathematics.
Deborah Courtney
(Director of Learning and Teaching)