Teaching and Learning
Swimming and Water Safety Program
Our three week program has now finished and it was a real success. Our students all showed improvement in confidence, technique and knowledge as a result of these sessions. I know that our families are grateful for the experience being a cost free one and for the goggle, towels and bags that were supplied at the beginning of the program for each student. Raywood kids and families are very lucky indeed!
Raywood Joins Australian Reading Hour- The Magic of Story Telling
On March 9th all of our students participated in the Australian Reading Hour Event which was streamed live from the Sydney Opera House. Our students were given the wonderful opportunity to watch well-known Australian childrens' authors go through the processes of constructing a story ( where ideas come from, how to communicate these ideas effectively to the reader, drafting and revising), in addition to this there were illustrators who went through their processes for illustrating a story.
Year P-2 News from Mrs Lightburn
Year 3-6 News from Mr Collins
Welcoming mentor texts to the Senior Room. Whilst always being a part of our program, the specific teaching of all areas of literacy through rich mentor texts is now in full swing. This fortnight we are pulling apart 'Two Mates' by Melanie and Maggie Prewett. This text is a wonderful third person recount centred around two best friends living in far northern Australia that do everything together. It's not until the end of the text that we find out that one of the main characters is actually in a wheelchair, and has taken part in all of the events on previous pages, despite his disability. From this comes in-depth conversations about the the message, genre, word choice, organisation and use of specific writing techniques. Texts like these become a fantastic framework to generate writing ideas from and motivate our kids to take their writing to the next level.
As part of our Integrated Studies Unit we have been learning about nutrition. This gave us the perfect opportunity to do a blind taste test with some common (and not so common fruits), once the sense of sight was removed the students found it a lot more challenging to identify the foods. As you can see below- we also had some strange facial expressions......
LOTE- Auslan
Have you been getting mini-Auslan lessons at home? Our students are so excited to be learning Australian Sign Language. We have been practising signing numbers, colours and animals- so as to be able to give instructions to complete activities (ie colour six blue elephants).
NAPLAN
This week has seen our Year 3 and 5 students begin NAPLAN testing. Yesterday they began with the Writing test and this saw our Yr 3 students complete the task with good old fashioned paper and pencil, whilst our Yr 5 students used a special lockdown browser feature to be able to complete their writing electronically On Friday both cohorts of students will sit the Reading test online. Then on Tuesday of next week they will both sit the Conventions and Numeracy online tests.
We wish to remind the students and their families, that these tests, although useful for a snapshot in time of a student's skills and understanding, do not define the student. We know that our students have their own unique talents and skills (many of which can not be measured by a test) and that they are so much more than a test score. We value their personal qualities, artistic talents, sporting abilities, thinking skills and curiosity as well as their academic abilities. At Raywood we celebrate all forms of student achievement.