Day 4 St Rita's - Vanessa Crouch

I know it's been a week but life as a teacher can be very busy! I've now got some time to finish processing the experience :)

How do you see the school’s educational and faith vision and mission informing and shaping daily practice?

The prayer experience in prayer with Prep today was beautiful. Not only was the experience beautiful but the Preps have clearly learned what it means to be part of the St Rita's community. They were certainly showing they can know more, do more and be more. The process was as follows

•  After the school prayer. There was then a special sharing about the student of the week. Each student thanks God for something special about the student.

Give your readers an idea of the application range of ICT/digital devices in the learning spaces.

• Www.highlightkids.com - website for Preps/ Yr 1 
• ELEARNING COMMITTEE MEETING
  • How did they get started with 1:1
  • ICLT -information communication learning technology
  • They have a technology levy that starts at prep to update all technology
  • They were able to secure some support from Bendigo Bank as part of their community program.
  • Meraki for ipods
  • Surface pros for teachers were purchased recently. 
  • CAST - connection alignment stewardship transformation
  • Idea of coaching and PLT arose from the need for teachers to be able to keep up with changes that are occurring. 
• In Yr 5 they were using Skitch to write over an image to create a map showing specific information on a country they are inquiring about in geography. The students then upload the image to Thinglink and add marks which show various pieces of information. 

What approaches are taken to cater for the diverse range of student learning needs?

• In Prep I noticed in some class they use a  Montessori and Reggio Emilia, combined philosophy of teaching. Play based but activites focused on very specific skills. The games and activities are not random choices they are specifically chosen to develop specific skills. Students have choice in the activities they can do.
• Teaching sentence construction and development of oral language skills. The have a wall for sentence making. Using noun and verbs terms to teach the language of grammar. 

Creating sentences in Prep

• Another great activity was the Voice Spinner. They spin the spinner and students say sentences in different ways, happy, sad etc. Then talk about why they might be using that voice. This was great in developing an understanding of why we use different voices as well as helping these you learners understand appropriate times to use these voices. 

When considering your own class teaching/organisation, what might be three approaches you have observed that could be adopted?

• I really like the Prep idea of creating sentences. I think I could modify this to make it useful in Stage 2. Have a focus on creating complex sentences maybe ...

Why are the learning environments engaging? What is going on to ensure each student progresses?

• For the Preps and Year 1s there is close monitoring of learning goals and use of visible learning techniques. 

Bible Text types

Helpful writing idea organiser

Learning Goals in Year 1