Avondale Herald

This week Mr Juan O’Shea attended the International ICT conference held at Suntec and hosted by the Ministry of Edication. It was a wonderful opportunity for him to listen to respected speakers and to participate in some new and innovative workshops. We look forward to Mr O’Shea returning and sharing his new found skills with both staff and students.

Australian National Curriculum update

The Australian National Curriculum was launched early this week (March 1, 2010), and all Australians are invited to visit the new website and have their say.  The purpose of the new National Curriculum is to deliver a set of national education goals to better prepare young people for their participation in a changing world.

 At the moment, the existence of eight different sets of education goals makes it difficult for the 80,000 students who relocate interestate each year.
The government believes that a uniform curriculum will make it easier to improve students’ learning and to develop high quality resources, and all Australian education ministers have committed to a set of national goals.

 According to Professor Barry McGaw, author of the draft, “The overall aim is to produce a final curriculum in English, history, mathematics, and science that equips all young Australians with the essential skills, knowledge and capabilities to thrive and compete in the globalised world and information rich workplaces of the current century.”
Some of the features of the new curriculum are:

• expectations in early years of learning clarified to address complexity of teaching to diverse student population
• the explicit teaching of grammar at every level that a child studies in every grade
• reading and writing taught using phonics, recognising and sounding out letters of the alphabet
• “the three L’s” of literacy, language and literature
• the teaching of “fluent and legible” handwriting
• literature studies using texts of “enduring or artistic value”
• the teaching of history in every grade
• history of major Asian partners as well as European origins
• greater acknowledgement of Australian history, including indegenous perspectives
• concept of sustainability and climate change to be taught
• science studies to be encouraged in university/ vocational training
• mental and written mathematical strategies to be tought along with other methods
• the interpretation of data to make informed judgements

Australian parents and teachers are all invited to have a say in the draft National Curriculum.  A new website has been set up for this purpose.   There, people will find the draft National Curriculum for Maths, English, Science and History, along with an introductory video, an online survey and instructions for providing feedback.

 The consultation period for these four learning areas will extend through to 23 May, 2010 and the final curriculum will be available to be taught in Australian schools from as early as 2011.

http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/Home

Kim Vernon

Curriculum Coordinator

Yesterday we witnessed a wonderful whole school athletics carnival. It was wonderful to be a part of the school spirit. In our hectic lives and with the pressure placed on students for academic performance, often physical activity can be forgotten.

For optimal health, research shows children should accumulate at least 30 minutes of moderate physical activity (e.g., brisk walking) every day and do vigorous sports or exercise 3 times a week. Singapore can offer so many wonderful opportunities for this to happen.

Ways parents can help

1. Frequently ask your child what physical activities he/she likes to do, then help them do it!
2. Be a role model. Show Children that physical activity is important by enthusiastically participating in it
3. Participate with your child (e.g., play catch, go on walks together).
4. Encourage your child to participate on sports teams (e.g., Soccer, basketball).
5. Plan family events, including weekend getaways and vacations, that include physical activity (e.g., hiking, water sports, skiing).
6. Enroll your child in out-of-school physical activity lessons (e.g., martial arts, dance, swimming, gymnastics). 
7. Take your child to places where she/he can move and play safely.
8. Monitor television viewing and video game play. Have your child “earn” time for these “low voltage” activities by accumulating minutes of physical activity.
9. Select gifts that promote physical activity (e.g., a ball, a jump rope, a pair of in-line skates).

Kim Vernon

Curriculum Coordinator

 Mathletics

 A reminder to parents that the Mathletics information session for all parents is on Tuesday 2nd March at 2:30pm in the ICT lab. Any parent wanting to know a little more are about the web-based program are encouraged to come along.

Information, Communication Technology

 As part of the students development of ICT, all students in Year 3-6 receive a school email address. This email account is monitored closely by both myself and Mr Juan O’Shea. Students are encouraged to use this account in an acceptable manner and are taught the effects of positive and negative use of such technology. Students will be  bringing home an ‘Internet Contract’. I encourage parents to discuss the importance of using IT services apporpriately with your child.  All contracts will need to be returned to Mr O’Shea and students will be reminded of their committment to use IT in an appropriate manner whilst at AGS.

PIPs Testing

As mentioned in the parent curriculum documents, PIPs in one of the new standardised tests we have introduced into Kindergarten this year. The students have each spent time with Ms Picken this week working through the assessment.

The PIPs program is a tool used to assess students entering Kindergarten. It can help teachers assess the progress of students in Literacy, Numeracy and Phonics development. To read a little more about the assessment visit http://www.education.uwa.edu.au/pips 

Kim Vernon

Curriculum/ ICT Coordinator

Dear Parents,

After three weeks of the new Mandarin curriculum, we would like to give you some general feedback:

Year 1:  The ‘CME for Kids’ Book 1 is proving to be the right level.  With our teacher’s support, children are proving to be able to meet the learning goals/progression.

Year 2:  Overall, the children are a little behind in their understanding of pinyin (the Mandarin phonetic system), but this is not likely to be an issue by the end of the year:  We believe that the children will be  able to catch up and meet the learning objectives of  the ‘CME for Kids’ Book 2.  The use of pinyin is widely accepted as assisting the learning of Mandarin by providing a link between the Chinese characters and their pronunciation.

Year 3 & 4:  In order to assess the suitability of the new curriculum, we conducted a test of the childrens’ ability last Thursday.  This showed quite varied levels of capability in a number of foundation skills, specifically:

1. Differentiation of spoken tones
2. Pinyin spelling
3. Speaking fluency
4. Character recognition

After careful consideration,  we have decided to delay starting on the CME Book 3, and to use the remainder of this term to re-build the confidence in the students and provide a stronger set of foundation skills for taking forward next term,  We will therefore be recapping Book 1 & 2‘s key points, and will re-test capability at the end of term.

Year 5 & 6:  The students are finding the contents of the textbook quite familiar, and having formally covered many of the topics it contains previously.  However, we believe it is important to more strongly build capability in some of the foundation skills before advancing to the next stage, through additional practice and application. We still believe the CME Book 1 is right for their current level and we will continue this as a whole.

At present, every class contains a variety of levels of Mandarin ability.  One major reason for this is the different degrees to which the students are exposed to Mandarin outside of school.  The need to advance the capability of all of the students within the same activities is very challenging, and commencing next term, we are planning to re-divide the existing classes by ability level to better serve the students’ needs.

In the meantime, we have an online support platform ( currently open to Year 5&6, it will soon open to Year 1 to 4) which allows the students to click and listen what they have learnt in class, as many times as they wish, in order to practice and reinforce classroom-based learning.

I will give more details of what we are going to learn in the next term, so parents can monitor their child’s learning progress.  Please feel free to drop a line with any questions or concerns so we can work together to achieve our goals. If you have, any concern please feel free to contact me and I am very happy to help.

Yanfen Shi

Mandarin Co-ordinator

Parents are invited an information session on Tuesday 2nd March at 2:30pm. This session will be led by a representitive from the Mathletics company. We currently use mathletics as part of our classroom work in Year 3-6 and would like students to utilise it at home as well. Students are able to use their school log on details to access it from home.

If you would like to learn a little more about the program and how you can help your child with it at home, please come along to the session. Please use the form below to RSVP your attendance.

Mathletics note to parents