Curriculum News

It’s hard to believe, but we are almost at the end of Term 1!  It has been an exciting, jam-packed term and we’re looking forward to a great year of learning.

Progress Reports

On Friday, our first Student Progress Reports were available for parents and carers to access on Sentral. These reports are designed to give more regular updates about student learning and to begin conversations about students’ achievement, effort and behaviour.  Progress reports are based upon the units of work that have been studied in class in the areas of Reading, Writing, Speaking & Listening and Number & Algebra.  Progress reports will be available at the mid-point mark of each term.  Next term, the results from the first term will still appear, allowing you to monitor your child’s progress.

Writing

Writing continues to be an exciting area at Chelsea Heights PS.  Students have been using their Writer’s Notebooks and are currently working through the writing process – plan, draft, revise, edit and publish – to create their first writing piece.  The genre focus this term has been narrative and recount writing, with a particular focus on short stories and using personal experiences as a basis for ideas.  The writing wall in the main corridor will be updated in the last week of term to showcase the writing students have done this term.  Recently our middle school students were lucky enough to be visited by Wendy Orr, who wrote the book Nim’s Island.  Wendy spoke to them about her writing process and how she comes up with her ideas and then works through multiple drafts.  Students were so engaged and had many interesting questions to ask.

Numeracy

This term, our numeracy units have been focused on place value.  Students have been exploring numbers in a range of different ways and have been modelling, representing, ordering, partitioning and regrouping numbers of different sizes.  The learning completed in this first unit is an important base for the rest of the year, as students use their place value knowledge to solve addition, subtraction, multiplication and division problems.

Within the Victorian Curriculum, there are four areas of proficiency: Understanding, Fluency, Problem Solving and Reasoning.

These proficiencies are so important to student learning in mathematics, ensuring that students have a range of skills and strategies when interpreting information and solving problems.

Below are the four proficiencies and examples of strategies students use in maths to show them:

Miss Bec Garrow, Leading Teacher