Learning and Teaching
Enhancing Learning Through Daily Reviews
Building Fluency and Long-Term Memory at SMCM
At SMCM we have introduced Daily Reviews into our classroom practice. In Barak Rosenshine’s work of developing the ‘Ten Principles of Instruction’, he researched the importance of the daily review. Daily Reviews are essential to students' learning. When we learn something new, we are prone to forgetting. This is known as the ‘Forgetting Curve’, developed by Herman Ebbinghaus. Forgetting is a natural process and if we do not review what we have learned, our memory of that information diminishes: we remember fewer details and find it harder to retrieve what we have learned. Retrieval practice supports building our long-term memory and our level of fluency in recall.
Therefore at SMCM, we begin our lessons in Literacy and Maths with a Daily Review. The purpose of a Daily Review is to support the development of fluency and automaticity in literacy and math skills. The significance of daily reviews is that they allow students to re-activate recently acquired knowledge, reducing cognitive load at the beginning of a lesson designed to build on the knowledge.
At SMCM we are using Daily Reviews to support our vocabulary learning. It might be that yesterday we learned the new word “discombobulate” meaning “to feel confused”. Today we want to use knowledge of the word to explore a text or add new vocabulary to our writing or oral language. We would then start our lesson with a daily review of the reading, syllabification, grammar, meaning, synonyms, antonyms, and a sentence to retrieve the meaning of the new word and to make schemas in our brain to put the new word into our long term memory so that it can be retrieved in the future. If we do not put learning into our long-term memory, then we forget what we have learned, therefore we have not really learnt anything new.
Word of the Week
This week's school-wide word of the week is “discombobulate’’. I encourage you to use this when speaking with your child so they have further opportunities to retrieve the meaning of discombobulate and ensure this new word is in their long-term memory.
From The Sports Desk
This week the Girls' Soccer and Boys' Cricket teams were presented with their Interschool Sports 'Premiers' flag from round one.
These teams showed great teamwork and development over the interschool sport rounds in the first term and have earned the right to represent our district at the next level. Many of these students were participating in these sports for the first time so to see such an amazing result was both encouraging and rewarding for the two coaches Colin and Melissa.
The teams will face off in a round robin style competition early in Term 3 against other districts in our area.
Rafael
Learning & Teaching and Digital Technologies Leader
Rafael.Fernandez@smcmeppingnth.catholic.edu.au
Allison
Science of Learning and Literacy Leader
Allison.Luff@smcmeppingnth.catholic.edu.au
Sawako & Rachel
Mathematics Leaders