The Junior Years (Years 3 – 6) phase of learning teachers recognises and takes pride in the facilitation of rich learning experiences to their students delivering the fully comprehensive set of MAPPEN Integrated Studies that include STEM.
Aligned with the Science of Reading, our literacy programs extend from the Early Childhood years through to the Junior years and thereby facilitating whole school approaches.
Over the two years, each child investigates concepts promoting rich conversations and building the child’s capacity to develop questions and to plan and conduct their inquiry. This allows students to showcase their learning to the school, families, and the wider community through, running fundraising events, hosting expos, performances, displays, and their creations.
The Year 6 teacher coordinator continues to liaise with high schools to help continue supporting students’ transition into secondary schooling. Each year, the Year 6 cohort attends an Adventure camp that supports students’ transition to high school, through developing independence, team-building skills, and life skills. The activities also complement the Health and Physical education curriculum by developing physical and social skills.
Talk for Writing
Talk for Writing provides all students the opportunity to succeed in and be excited by writing through direct scaffolding, visible feedback, and rich oral language. Talk for writing places emphasis on three distinct areas:
- Imitation – Learning and internalising of a model text through rich oral language activities such drama, discussions, writing toolkits and shared reading.
- Innovation – Students develop their own modified version of a model text with assistance, scaffolding and feedback from the teacher where needed.
- Invention (Independent Application) – Students use the skills learnt to create their own original texts.
Talk for Reading
Introduces a clear and logical sequence for teaching reading within the Talk for Writing program moving children towards independence. We focus on the importance of deepening understanding and engagement through the development of vocabulary, grammar skills, line-by-line reading and key reading strategies.
PLD Synthetic Phonics Program
PLD’s structured synthetic phonics approach emphasizes explicit instruction of phonics, decoding, and spelling along with time-efficient tracking of student performance that informs the targeted teaching.
Decodable Readers
For some of the older students, reading interventions such as; MultiLit and decodable readers are needed to support them as they practice reading texts containing a very large percentage of words that incorporate the letter-sound relationships that they have been taught. The decodable texts increase in complexity as the student learns more of the phonetic code.
Literacy Pro
Is a blended literacy program that is individualised to encourage students to read texts matched to their abilities, allowing them to gain valuable reading practice and build on their comprehension skills. Literacy Pro is accessible to students both in and out of school.
Mathletics
Mathematics is supplemented with Mathletics. Mathletics is an online maths program that builds confidence through personalised learning, exciting games, and mastery challenges, which clearly show students’ strengths and areas that need extra attention. Mathletics is accessible to students both at school and at home.
BrightPath Assessments
BrightPath assessments are scheduled throughout the year to capture and evaluate student growth in writing, mathematics, and science allowing teacher judgments to be consistent.