A message from the Principal
Sharing and celebrating learning
As we get to the end of term and reach the three-quarter stage of the school year, our teachers have been busy continuing to regularly share samples of learning for each child in Reading, Writing, Maths, Art, Performing Arts and Italian using Seesaw, our ongoing reporting platform.
It is wonderful to log in to Seesaw and spend some time viewing these samples of learning across the school. The range of different types of work uploaded - including videos, audio comments, written comments and photos provide an incredibly detailed picture of what is happening in the classroom and the diligence, creativity and resilience our students demonstrate to make progress each day.
I was keen to share some of the great ways that Seesaw is being used to bring parents more closely into the learning process and to allow you to understand your child's progress in ways that were almost impossible with our older reporting systems.
The two pictures above are two writing samples from the same child - in March and in August of this year - clearly showing their wonderful learning growth.
As your child’s portfolio rapidly increases in this way, it has been pleasing to see most parents visiting Seesaw regularly to view their child’s learning and build their understanding of the growth they are making and the goals that they are working hard to master.
In Literacy, Year 5/6 students have been reading and analysing mentor texts from the CBCA Children's Book Awards shortlist for 2023. The book 'Amazing Animal Journeys' was used to help students identify key language, organisation, and presentation features of engaging factual texts. Students then reworked and up-levelled parts of their original Big Write, based on this style of non-fiction writing.
Video roleplays from Italian allows Natalie to record and share students speaking the langauge.
Photos of artwork allows parents to see the amazing work done in Visual Arts.
We strongly believe in the power of sharing actual samples of your child's learning with you in this 'ongoing' way and their current learning goals.
We are therefore asking parents to do the following:
- Regularly jump onto Seesaw (we suggest once a week) to see if any posts of student work have been released by teachers. We have found with Seesaw at times, notifications don’t come through to parents especially when two posts might be released on the same day.
- If you don’t have your login details and instructions on how to access Seesaw, please email your child's teacher (via Compass) and they can provide these to you quickly and easily. We have recently discovered there are still some families who haven’t signed up to the system.
- You are in control of how often you're notified about new information on Seesaw. If you would like alerts when teachers have posted new items, you need to turn on push notifications. Below are your options in the Seesaw Family account to ensure you have notifications on so you don’t miss out on posts:
- Tap your profile icon in the upper left corner.
- Tap 'Account Settings.'
- Turn email and/or push notifications ON/ONCE A DAY/OFF.
- As stated previously, please continue to provide positive feedback to the teachers on these reports. As this way of reporting is still quite new, it would make their hard work worthwhile and reassure us we are on the right track to hear if you have found the Seesaw samples useful to understand your child's learning. A quick email or chat in the schoolyard about the work samples would be much appreciated.
Teachers have received lots of positive comments from parents throughout the term already and it really has justified and supported the amazing work they are doing.
As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback on things and please do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like to discuss things further.
Neil Scott
Principal