Literacy News
SMART Spelling
On Friday March 18, all SKiPPS staff participated in a Professional Development day at school.
We spent the day with Michelle Hutchison who has created the SMART Spelling program that is now being used in thousands of primary schools across Australia.
Effective immediately, SMART Spelling is being used in every classroom every day, it follows a strict weekly routine that is short, sharp and precise in its delivery.
SMART Spelling incorporates both the systematic teaching of spelling each week along with personal words from the students’ own writing. SMART teaches in patterns as much as possible. Students are then guided to choose from the list they have studied in class, to suit their individual needs.
Every class follows the same principle as explained in a little detail below.
- Say – students repeat the word, it is important that they hear the word and feel the facial movements.
- Meaning – the meaning of the word is shared.
- Analyse – SOUNDS We use our fingers to record the sounds that we can hear. LETTERS We say the letters that represent the sounds.
- Remember – We ask the students what part of the word they think they need to remember. This will be different for some of the students but for many it is a focus on digraphs (2 letters making 1 sound i.e.’sh’) and trigraphs (3 letters making 1 sound i.e. ‘igh’).
- Teach – The students spell the word aloud to the teacher using letter names and clustering the sounds.
Ask your child to share some examples with you!
The feedback from our staff was extremely positive and there is definitely a sense of excitement as we all share our SMART stories with each other.
Classroom Libraries - 2022 Phase 2
2022 has us in our second year of building SKiPPS Classroom Libraries.
It has been such a thrill to see all the students having access to high quality literature in their classrooms. I have loved visiting the different spaces and hearing about how different classes are using their libraries.
We are wanting to share these fabulous new resources with all of you and are excited to share that there will be an opportunity very soon for parents to come in and join us for a story of two from the classroom libraries. Stay tuned! In the meantime, there are still LOADS of fabulous books that are waiting to be contacted.
The teachers are slowly making their way through them and Carolyn, our Library technician is doing an amazing job at keeping on top of this. However, if any parents were keen to assist, we would LOVE some help! Please let your child’s teacher know if you are free to contact some books or come and grab me one morning! THANK YOU in advance!
This year I have been attempting to build up our Non Fiction collections for all year levels as well as books on Sustainability and the Environment and books with an Indigenous and diversity focus.
Phase 2 of the project starts to get a greater level of input from the students. The students are asked to sort/classify their classroom collections into subjects/topics of their choice and put them together as a collection in a student labeled tub.
These topics are subject to change each term as requested by the students in each individual space. The idea behind this is that the students take some ownership in the way their library is presented and accessed as well as build pride on their classroom collection.
If the students feel that their classroom is lacking a particular topic, genre, author etc….. then they only have to make a request and where possible we will fill that. Enjoy looking at these great images of the evolving libraries.
Jacqueline Morphy
Literacy Leader