Curriculum in Focus 

TUTOR LEARNING INITIATIVE (TLI) AT OGPS

My name is Donna Heffernan and I am one of the tutors at OGPS.  I work in conjunction with classroom teachers to provide individual and/or small group tutoring, targeting specific areas to assist in supporting the learning and engagement of students who require it. 

Tutoring provides selected students with extra targeted learning support.

I am currently working with a range of students in Year 1, 2 and 3 in the areas of reading, writing and maths. The students I work with have been selected based on analysis of data and in consultation with individual year level teams and teachers.  

Where possible, I try to work with pairs or small groups of students as they are able to learn from each other. The groups are flexible in that, some students may be in the group for a couple of weeks, have learnt and are applying different strategies, so no longer need the extra assistance. These students are monitored by the class teacher and myself.

Parents/carers are also a vital part of this process. It is great to be working with so many enthusiastic parents/carers who are listening to their children read extra books and/or complete various writing and maths tasks at home. A successful partnership involves the class teacher, tutor and parents/carers.  Together we are able to make a difference.

Thank you

Donna Heffernan

Learning Specialist

Last fortnight, we looked into problem solving and using reasoning processes to ‘level up’ the thought processes. 

Check out this Number Ninjas challenge that a class in the middle school looked at last week: 

Find two numbers that have a difference of less than 115. 

It sounds simple, right? Sit down and work it out together as a family. How long do you think it would take to come up with all of the possible solutions? Can you prove you have all of the possible solutions? What tools could you use to help check your work? Could you create a rule that would help? How could decimals, fractions or negative numbers come into play? 

As we near the holidays and long car trips, questions like this can be a fun way to pass the time and work on improving reasoning skills.  

Ann Miller

Numeracy Learning Specialist