APA News

Welcome back to Term 3!

ICAS Assessments

This year St Saviour’s Primary will be participating in the world-renowned ICAS AssessmentsTM.

ICAS is designed to target students’ higher-order thinking and problem-solving skills in English, Mathematics, Science, Writing, Spelling Bee and Digital Technologies. This year St Saviour’s Primary students in Years 3 – 6 have the optional opportunity to participate in the English and Mathematics tests only.

For more information on the tests and the registration process, please see the below link.

The St Saviour's Primary and St Patrick's Cathedral Race Day will take place on Saturday the 30th October 2021.

As per attachments to this newsletter, tickets will go on sale from today.  Please direct deposit into the bank account and your tickets can be sent home with your child.  Family and friends are warmly invited to attend as well.

We are still on the look out for a few more sponsors.  If you own a business or would like to contribute toward the race day by sponsoring, please send me an email via sam.hannant@twb.catholic.edu.au

IGNITE LEARNING 

At St Saviour's Primary we want our learners to STRIVE at LEARNING and at LIFE and they can do that through the following learning dispositions:

Recently I have written about several of the learning dispostions that we are focusing on here at St Saviour's Primary School.

Today I would like to briefly write about the importance of talking about and demonstrating the "innards" of learning.  You may have noticed that lately, staff are calling your children 'learners', rather than 'students'.  There is a good reason for this.

People's beliefs, attitudes, values and dispositions are contagious.  Children pick them up unwittingly from everyone around them, particularly their parents, teachers and siblings.  How we (as teachers and parents) speak and behave in the presence of children matters.  

Claxton & Carlzon (2019) talk of a classroom example where the teacher began to slightly tweak her vocabulary towards learning and the positive influence that it had.  She stopped using the word 'work' and she starterd used the word 'learning'. Work generally refers to something that someone doesn't want to do.  The word learning can encourage curiosity, wonder and experimentation.  

Even though this teachers knows making mistakes is a part of learning, she also knows that students have an aversion to making mistakes. Therefore, rather than talking about the mistake, she talked to the learner about improvement.  Rather than correcting mistakes, she asked them how they could improve on what they had already done.

Although these are two simple changes that can be made in a classroom, they can have a positive impact on learning.  Why not give it a go at home as well.... 

Sources:

Claxton, G. & Carlzon, B.  (2019).  Powering up Children: The Learning Power Approach to Primary Teaching.  California, USA: Corwin.