Teaching and Learning
Hi everyone! Welcome to 'Teaching and Learning' with Miss Eade and Mrs Collins (Miss Anderson) ...lucky for us, we get to take over because Mr Snow is busy writing the Principal's Report this week!!!
You may not know but we are busy in the background working on making Literacy and Numeracy the BEST at Skye PS. Developing curriculum scope and sequences, running professional learning sessions, participating in learning walks to improve our instructional model, administering cohort assessment and many other things! We work in the office one day a week and in the classroom for the other four days - Miss Eade teaches 2A and Mrs Collins is in 5A.
This week, we wanted to share some of the exciting things that have happened recently at Skye in the Literacy and Numeracy space!
It’s no secret that we LOVE books at Skye PS! We are incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful library filled with stories, adventures and endless opportunities to discover something new. Our library wouldn’t be the special place it is without our amazing librarian, Tarnia, who puts so much care into creating a space where our students can develop a genuine love of reading. She also created some wonderful experiences and competitions for our students which brought lots of smiles and excitement...even when some of the sheep went missing mysteriously.
Book Week was the perfect opportunity to celebrate that love of books, and we were absolutely blown away by the creativity and imagination behind this year’s costumes! From much-loved characters to clever and wonderfully original ideas, it was fantastic to see so many stories brought to life across our school. A huge thank you to our students, families and staff for getting into the Book Week spirit and making the celebration so much fun!
Over the past 12–18 months, we have been developing a Maths Fluency Scope and Sequence and program to meet the needs of our learners at Skye. This has been a significant body of work, involving consultation with up-to-date research, familiarisation with Department-developed resources, and learning from professionals in the field such as David Morkunas.
Our senior grades (Years 4–6) have been trialling the program for most of this year and have seen some significant improvements in their students’ ability to automatically recall number facts. This term, our Grade 2 students have also launched into fluency, and their teachers have been pleasantly surprised by their increased confidence and understanding.
The structure follows a similar process to our instructional model, with Model, Practice and Apply phases. Students begin by rehearsing a set of facts, for example the 5 times tables, before practising these facts on their whiteboards and then applying their knowledge to a fluency grid. The three phases are shown below...
Excitingly, the work we have been doing was acknowledged by the department and we were asked to write an 'Evidence to Action: Share Your Journey' article. This was published on the department's Arc website and is something we are very proud of you. You can read it by clicking here.
Have a lovely weekend,
Hailee and Krystal