Focus on Learning 

We warmly welcome back our students and families for another busy and productive term! This term we continue our journey of providing high qaulity learning opportunities for our students, through investigating the strengths and weaknesses of all students, knowing their interests, providing immediate feedback and using student data to inform our decisions. 

Once again, this page will be dedicated to celebrating student achievement and sharing the wonderful learning that is occurring in our classes, starting this week with sharing the successes of our STARS Word Reading Program and a report on writing in Stage 3. 

STARS Word Reading Program 

Last term we introduced our new reading support program; STARS Word Reading Program. We have seen great success with this program already in this short amount of time and look forward to this continued success as the year continues. 

At the conclusion of last term, we celebrated the achievements of many of our infants students in their word reading abilities. 

Congratulations to:

Andy, Riley and Tayla for being awarded the Rising Star award (mastering 50 Star Words);

Nate R, Oliver and Molly for being awarded the Shooting Star award (mastering 100 Star Words);

Addison, Mia, Lyla, Delia and Kendall for being awarded the Shining Star award (mastering 150 Star Words);

Patrick, Ryder, Brooklyn, James and Nate N for being awarded the Super Star award (mastering all 200 Star Words). 

Stage 3 Writing

Written by Olive Dillon, Year 5

Last term in Stage 3, we read the book ‘The Happiest Refugee’ by Anh Do. The story is about Anh Do’s journey from Vietnam to Australia to escape the war and the journey of how they got there. It had pictures and small details that you wouldn’t really expect to happen in the life of a refugee, including the odd hilarious parts here and there. Reading this book really showed us how much Anh and his family had to go through and how much pressure it would be, being a refugee and making one of the biggest journeys away from home. 

As we made our way through the book, we had to complete a writing task where we had to take the perspective of Anh Do and write about his boat journey. 

Once we finished the book, our task was to write a persuasive text, answering the question 'Should we let refugees into Australia?'. To help us write, we reflected on the story of Anh Do and current world situations, such as the awful situation in Ukraine.  Mrs Bartholomew took us through the writing process of planning, drafting, conferring and refining our writing. The conferring phase is where we met one on one with Mrs Bartholomew and Mrs Murray to talk about our writing and get feedback on what we are doing well and how we can improve our writing even more. From our conferences, we could then begin to refine our writing, ready to move onto publishing. Everyone had their own opinions on the topic, and we made sure that each opinion was respected.  We are now in the process of creating a presentation based on our writing that we will present to the class. 5/6 students have really enjoyed reading the book and writing both persuasive and informative texts on refugees and Anh Do.