Day 5 - St Rita's Victoria Point Group Reflection

This morning we visited Year 2. Their main focus for this morning is the Reading To Learn program. The program involves a focus on one text for three to four weeks. This texts provides learning activities for reading, writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation. The introduction of the text involves a whole class reading of the book and then a focus on the text, looking in particular at the structure and the grammar. The children were involved in highlighting, discussing and identifying text features. In another classroom we observed another part of this process where the focus was on the characters and their actions. This was leading to the students doing some independent writing. In the third classroom was saw yet another part of the process focused on spelling. It seems to be a holistic approach to teaching all aspects of literacy using one text as the stimulus. All children are involved and using the same text for their learning.

Part of the Reading to Learn Process

The Year 2 prayer included Christian Meditation as part of the routine. There were slight variations to what we had have been shown in Lismore recently. All children we sitting eyes closed and focused… even when we entered the room.

This program is quite different to what some of our schools have within their literacy block structure. Guided Reading is not as much a critical component within the block and there appears to be much less group work.  The focus is much more on a whole text and class focus. Although the text is at one level, they scaffold and support the students within the different ability levels. All students can achieve reading the text by the end of the 3 week process.

In the different Year 2 classrooms we also observed the use of learning goals. Some of these goals were long term, whole year goals while others were short term focused goals around one particular aspect of learning. There are some nice ideas about how to display these goals.

Writing goals in Year 2

We also met with Wendy who is part of the Student Support Team. She discussed the gifted and talented whole school approach within the school. This is a reasonable new focus area. It involves a process of pre-assessment (across different curriculum areas), collecting data, meetings between Wendy and the teacher and then Wendy and the parents and then an action plan is developed as to how they will differentiate within the classroom. (CDP - Curriculum Differentiation Plan)

Wendy also withdraws groups of children within the school. A gifted and talented committee has been established who meet once a term. Wendy includes a section in the newsletter as a support for parents.

In the Year 3 classrooms we observed a Mathematics lessons. The school uses a variety of textbooks to support mathematics learning. This was very different or opposite approach to what we use in our schools. We are wondering how often or how much concrete ,materials are used to support mathematics learning as we haven’t observed many mathematics lessons. Our approach in Lismore is to use concrete materials and hands on experiences to expose learners to the ideas without the support of text books.

One interesting idea in the Year three room was the word tree which had rings with word and spelling patterns and story starter ideas. They also have hanging various resources to on ‘ladders’ for Religion (text types of the Bible) and writing.

Bible Text Types

One Year 3 class was in the eSpace working as a whole class on Study Ladder revising skills they have worked on. It is an opportunity for all the class working on the laptops at the same time. The only have a few laptops per class therefore they have to access the eSpace (a room with a class set of laptops.

One area we noticed across the school which didn't quite fit with the overall pedagogical approach to learning was the use of mathematics text books across all grades. We are curious about why textbooks were used and how often hands on activities are used across the school. We have not seen many lessons where concrete materials were used to support learning. The lessons were focused on completing text pages. This is opposite to the learning witnessed in literacy, history, geography and religion.