Natanya (Tany) Milner – Head of Primary

We are hoping to provide you with a greater overview of Primary School initiatives and perspectives through Ma Nishma. As a result, the weekly articles will be written by a different member of the Primary School executive each week. We aim to provide this broader view without increasing the overall length of Ma Nishma. We hope you enjoy the greater breadth of articles in the coming months.

 Year 6 Leadership Camp

This week Year 6 students and teachers went on Leadership Camp. This three-day program focused upon developing student leaders in the Primary School. The students learnt collaborative skills and ways to best manage communication and conflict resolution. They also spent time organising initiatives for the Primary School within their portfolios. A huge thanks goes to the teachers involved in the camp. Thank you to Hugo Adrian (who also co-ordinated the camp), Adam Carpenter, Meghan Carroll, Diane Clennar, Kimberley Haddix and Karon Rom. I thoroughly enjoyed watching them guide the children through their leadership learning and the students responded with insight and positive energy. Thank you to Holly Dillon for her organisational support and all the teachers who are mentoring the portfolio teams.

Please save the date for these informative evenings:

• Meet the Teacher – Monday 18 February
• Parent Teacher Evening – 1 April or 3 April

Katie Brody – Director of Studies K-6

 Flexible Grouping, an effective strategy for differentiated learning

Addressing student need through a flexible grouping structure allows each individual student to build self-efficacy around learning, as the likelihood of feeling successful and making gains can be more overt when the group is relatively homogenous. Our flexible grouping strategy at Emanuel School organises students intentionally and fluidly for different subject areas such as Maths, Reading and Hebrew. Groupings are well-matched to the purpose and they are determined using assessment results, work samples over time and anecdotal data. Students meet in their groups, together with a teacher, for targeted instruction that addresses the readiness, pace, depth and complexity needed by the learners in their group. If students begin to perform beyond the level of their current group, teachers then extend and stretch the students’ thinking. If the achievement of a student begins to appear similar to the level of the students in a different group, it can be beneficial to offer the student a chance to move into that group where the learning is more aligned with their need in terms of pace and complexity.

In these early weeks of Term 1, the teachers have been getting to know all of their students socially, emotionally and academically. Extensive assessment data and anecdotal information from previous teachers has been passed on during team ‘hand-over’ meetings, and initial placement into groups is almost complete. We look forward to working together with parents to foster the engagement, intrinsic motivation and progress of the children. We believe that we are successful if students are correctly placed with their learning needs met and we appreciate parents supporting the view that higher placements are not considered a ‘prize’ to strive for, but rather that they are a placement where the student can work at an appropriately challenging level to optimise engagement and progress.

Home learning with a focus on reading

In a recent newspaper article by renowned children’s author, Morris Gleitzman, he presented a compelling reason to work on instilling a love of learning in our children that is not always recognised as a benefit of reading. Gleitzman reminded us that, “Stories don’t just help kids develop language literacy, they help them develop life literacy too”. What he is referring to, of course, is that the journey that children travel down when they engage with the plight of a character, is one that allows them to face a problem bigger and possibly more difficult than any they’ve faced before. To solve or survive the problem, the character must develop skills and qualities beyond their previous experience.

As our children learn to navigate the world, process the challenges they face and gradually develop independence and personal strength, reading can serve as ‘bibliotherapy’ and can support the emotional and social education that parents and teachers so lovingly engender. Gleitzman’s article listed the following outcomes of reading that go beyond the obvious literacy benefits:

• Children learn to think bravely and honestly about what is causing the problem for the character.
• Children develop the thinking skills to better understand what the character is facing.
• Children recognise that big problems require teamwork, so the character needs to form friendships and alliances, all of which requires the development of people skills, in particular, empathy.
• Children see that creative thinking is vital because a character with a problem needs problem-solving strategies.
• Children build resilience because they see that big problems never get solved quickly but require persistence over time.

As young characters move through their problem-solving journeys, our children are right at their side, their imagination firing, offering advice and creative solutions, whilst hoping for the success of the characters they have grown to care about. All the while, they are noticing the imagery, the vocabulary, the grammar, spelling, punctuation and the sentence structure that we know develop in voracious readers of all ages.

In Term 4 last year, the new Emanuel School Home Learning Policy was introduced. This policy, developed through extensive consultation with teachers, parents and students, holds reading at home and discussing the reading, as the primary focus of home learning, especially in Years K-2, but across Years 3-6 as well. It is recommended that you familiarise yourself with this policy again and the related Home Learning Parent Resources Page – click here. For age-based book recommendations, click here.