Learning & Teaching
Year 5 Aspire Leadership program:
Today our Year 5 students took one of their first steps towards student leadership for 2024 by participating in an Aspire Higher Leadership Workshop with Unleashing Personal Potential (UPP). The day-long program provided moments for learning, action and reflection about leadership. UPP Program Leaders, Gil and Jamie, led our Year 5 leaders through discussions and activities that showed the importance of unlocking their leadership potential through kindness and empathy, listening, knowing their strengths and the strengths in others, the power of our thoughts, clear effective communication and how leadership is really about the small acts of service and kindness we show to others and our community.
All of our leaders were led through the ASPIRE Framework and encouraged to lead through action, service, persistence, influence, respect and encouragement. We look forward to seeing their leadership blossom in 2024.
Intervention 2024:
I can't believe that we are already discussing 2024, but here we are with only a few more weeks left of the school year. We have only a couple of sessions left of Literacy Intervention, and I am so proud of the growth and achievements of the students who participated in these sessions. Your dedication, efforts and perseverance is truly inspirational.
Following our school's commitment to evidence-based instruction, we have decided to introduce an evidence-informed program called, MiniLit Sage, in 2024. This program will assist Year 1 & 2 students in need of additional support for reading.
MiniLit Sage provides targeted small group work for 45 minutes, four times a week using a carefully structured program. Each lesson has two distinct areas of instruction:
• Working with Sounds and Words – where children are explicitly taught the relationship between sounds and letters and how this knowledge is critical to reading
• Practice and Application – where further opportunities are provided for the children to practise their reading skills using a variety of activities and resources.
We also have the Corrective Reading program which is a direct instruction reading program designed to help students in Year 3 and above to develop decoding and fluency skills. This program is also carefully structured and delivered within a small group setting four times per week. Each session runs for 40 minutes and builds connections between sounds and letters and builds fluency skills through reading exercises at a word, sentence and text level.
These programs complement the whole class structured literacy (MSL) approach we already have here at STM, and will open up the opportunity for us to provide more Literacy support and intervention sessions in 2024. The programs will be led by myself as Literacy Intervention Leader and I have the honour of working with a dedicated team of Learning Support Officers who will deliver their set program to their set groups.
Families will be notified early next year of any student participation in intervention programs for 2024.
Our new STM Learning Enhancement Centre will open in 2024 which will be a dedicated intervention space. Many of our learning enhancement programs (Literacy and Maths) will be held here.
HELP needed to cover books!
We have just received a delivery of 720 decodable books, and we need help covering these before the new school year. It would be great to have a team of volunteers to achieve this. Please let me know if you can assist and we can arrange a contact covering party!
There are so many things to look forward to in 2024. It is a privilege to be part of a school community that is always looking for ways to grow and improve, so we can provide the best education to all of our students.
Take care
Danielle
Deputy Principal & Learning & Teaching Leader