Literacy and Numeracy

Numeracy

Summer is here; the sun is shining and it's time for some summer sporty fun!

Watching a tennis match or a game of cricket provides lots of opportunities for some maths-y chats. 

Cricket games are filled with graphs, percentages, averages and rates. Asking your children questions and explaining concepts they don't yet understand will help improve their numeracy. If you are unsure how the concepts work there is a great article here with lots of details. 

If tennis is more your slam, I mean jam, you might like to read through the article here. Again, there is heaps of ideas to spark numeracy based conversations.

 I hope you have a ball watching sports with your children these holidays!

Joke: 

Q: What did the zero say to the 8? 

A: Nice belt

Puzzle: Four children were trying to guess their teacher’s age.

Their guesses were 23, 28, 34 and 45 years.

With a smile, the teacher told them that none of them had found his exact age.

However to give them a hint, he told them that his age was between the highest and lowest of their guesses, and remarkably, the errors of their four guesses gave a total equal to his age. How old was the teacher?

Solution to last puzzle:  The answer is 54

For those who have enjoyed the newsletter puzzles this year, here is a little gift for the holiday season. Merry Christ-maths everyone! 

Literacy

Reflection

While reflecting on how literacy is being taught at Sandringham College this year, it occurred to me that honest reflection would be a great end of year literacy writing task for students to attempt. The ability to reflect on your understandings will help give perspective on what you are capable of, as well as things you might want to focus on for next year. 

Over the summer, it is important not to forget the lessons we have learned. One of the ways to do that is by building good home literacy habits that can be done every day. Set a target of how many books you want to read; ensure that you engage with your local library to find new and exciting stories; set aside 20 minutes each day to read, whether a book, the sports report, or even the captions of a movie; give Journal writing a shot and begin writing morning pages;  or try the reflection mentioned above and extend it into something that you write every week. 

MYLNS

The MYLNS program expands next year, providing targeted support and intervention for students with specific literacy and numeracy needs at Years 8, 9 and 10. We will also have the Advance literacy program at Year 7, which runs using a similar framework. Our results from MYLNS this year have been encouraging, with testing showing that nearly every student has displayed growth since the beginning of the year; in some cases, over 2 years' worth. 

Tutoring 

The DET announced that the tutoring program will continue to run next year in response to the difficulties presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and online learning. Sandringham College aims to use the tutoring program to provide further targeted intervention for students who encountered challenges when learning online. Parents of students identified for tutoring will be contacted in due course.