First Week Back

It is great to reflect on what has been a positive start to the new term. It was wonderful to see everyone return from their holidays so happy to see each other and full of chat prior to the bell ringing on the first Monday. There was a buzz in our space while students and parents caught up with each other. We have welcomed into our team a new teacher whom has has a positive energy and students have accepted this change well.

We tested students knowledge on time in a pre-test and discovered there were many gaps. Therefore we arranged new groups and quickly got going with new workshops and teaching. We are going to continue this for next week and post test to see growth in knowledge and skills. Students have settled into these workshops with minimal fuss and have shown increased reliability with completion of follow up tasks. As educators we have ensured we have established problem solving tasks for students to complete that maintain addition and subtraction work from last term as well as to challenge students with aspects of time.

It was awesome to get the wearable arts work underway and students seemed to enjoy and work well within their designated groups. It was fun to have some Year 7 and 8 students in our mix and get to know some new students. We need to ensure that we encourage students to turn up with the correct materials for our  first making day on Friday.

Sport this week was busy with our North Zone tournament and although the team I took this week lost many games they displayed awesome sportsmanship and I was proud  of them and proud to be associated with them.

In literacy it was great to continue with an already successful programme that was fine tuned to better monitor on task work and noise by having an extra educator present in the quiet space. This did require constant reminding therefore was a necessary adjustment. The one negative aspect of the week was the huge amount of students in our Friday club....we will endeavour to promote less of this next week through gentle reminders and further use of house points to encourage students who complete all that is required of them!