Assistant Principal's Report

Welcome Back!

What a great to 2019 we have seen at Marlborough this year. It has been great to see students reconnecting with friends from last year, making new friendships and being so welcoming to our new students throughout the school. A massive welcome to our new Foundation students. Seeing the optimism and joy in their eyes as they walked in last Friday ready for the next big chapter in their lives. 

I hope that everyone was able to spend more time following their passions over the school break. I was able to spend more time with my family, spending two weeks in Tasmania with my wife and two boys. Australia is such a lovely place to travel around, we are so lucky to have such a rich landscape on our doorstep. We also managed to camp out in the back yard, and everyone survived! We have decided to try to get away a little more on weekends and camping is a great way to do that. However, being the only one in my family with any camping experiences we felt the backyard was a good first step. 

I wish everyone a wonderful 2019 at school, there are so many exciting things planned througout the year! 

SMART spelling

Last Wednesday and Thursday staff undertook fantastic professional learning developing our understanding of the SMART spelling program. This program will be rolled out across the whole school in 2019 and be how we approach the teaching of spelling at Marlborough. This will provide us with a consistent approach from Foundation to Year 6, and the staff were very impressed with the program. 

Teams will be talking about how this will look in each area of the school tomorrow evening at their information sessions, however, there is a consistency of language and program across the school. While our spelling across the school was good, we wanted to ensure a consistent approach and the feedback from the many schools we spoke with before engaging in the training provided such high praise for SMART spelling, we were confident it would be the program that would be a good fit for us. 

SMART (Say, Meaning, Analyse, Remember, Teach) spelling will provide all students a program where they are studying a focus or spelling rule for the week. This program has 4 spelling rules, plus 7 rules for plurals, to learn and throughout the training, all teachers were amazed at how much sence this program and approach made, even our most experienced teachers! 

One of the important elements for all families to understand is how we will be improving how we 'correct' students writing work. In fact, we won't be 'correcting' every word on the page that is a wrong spelling attempt. One of the core elements of the SMART program is to look for teachable moments in students writing. A student may have a number of errors in their writing, however, we don't want to discourage students from being ambitious writers by 'correcting' all over their work. We will be looking for one, maybe two for stronger writers, words where we can spend the time teaching students about the spelling of that word. As the trainer told us - Newspaper editors correct spelling: Teachers teach. Therefore, students will come home and their books will have words that are not 'corrected' in them - this will not be a case where teachers have missed words, or not looked at the students' learning. This is certainly a shift in approach and with all things look to improve we will be monitoring the SMART spelling program closely.

I would encourage all families to talk with their classroom teacher about the SMART spelling program, once it is up and running in the next week or two and ask questions to clarify the expectations on students.