Literacy and Numeracy

Assessment Days - Thank you!

Welcome to 2023!  I hope that everyone had a great break and has returned to school refreshed, re-charged and ready for a great year of learning.  

A big thank you to all of our St James families for your support of our Assessment Days. These sessions have a dual purpose; the first being that your child is able to begin to form a relationship with their new teacher in a small group setting and are able to familiarise themselves with their new setting.  Secondly, a large amount of data is able to be collected in a relatively short amount of time.  This data provides an immediate starting point for your child's learning.  Assessment tasks included spelling, dictation, number skills, reading and comprehension and a writing sample.  Our junior students also had a focus on letter and sound knowledge.  

Teachers have already commenced analysing the data collected and are using this to plan Term 1 learning.  

Wishing you all the best for the year ahead

Mrs. Cathy Dimitrakopoulos

Literacy/Learning and Teaching Leader

cathy.dimitrakopoulos@sjvermont.catholic.edu.au

     Mathematics - Reasoning in Mathematics

At St. James, we encourage all of our students to be mathematical thinkers. Students having the opportunity to explain their thinking to their peers is very powerful. Students learn from each other and create a range of different strategies. When you are talking to your child about their learning, or their mathematics, always encourage them to share their thinking. You will be amazed at some of their explanations.

Reasoning is a key component of the Victorian Curriculum. Here is some information below. 

Reasoning refers to students developing an increasingly sophisticated capacity for logical, statistical and probabilistic thinking and actions, such as conjecturing, hypothesising, analysing, proving, evaluating, explaining, inferring, justifying, refuting, abstracting and generalising. Students are reasoning mathematically when they:

• explain their thinking
• deduce and justify strategies used and conclusions reached
• adapt the known to the unknown
• transfer learning from one context to another
• prove that something is true or false
• make inferences about data or the likelihood of events
• compare and contrast related ideas and explain their choices.

 Josh Crowe

                                                                   Mathematics Leader

                                             joshua.crowe@sjvermont.catholic.edu.au