While we are still working at a high level of care and with our precautions in place, it is lovely to see most girls returning to school and to in-class learning. We have quickly moved to a new routine of staggered starts and meal breaks, temperature checks on arrival and higher levels of personal care, with face-to-face learning being embraced by the girls with a greater sense of enjoyment and participation. The teachers are quickly reassessing where each girl’s learning is and targeting these levels to ensure the greatest progress can be made for the remainder of this term.

As I pass by classrooms, I see girls working diligently, hands raised to ask questions and ready to receive quick responses, something the girls really missed with Learn@Home. Small group lessons are occurring and greater use of the whiteboard and smartboard is being made when explicitly teaching and revising concepts.

The teachers are also busy assessing students for the End of Semester reports. These reports will be finalised in the next few weeks and will be available for distribution in the first week of the June/July school holidays.

Wet Weather Readiness

From a number of reports, it is going to be a wet winter. I ask for parents’ support to ensure that a raincoat or small folding umbrella is packed into school bags. The rainy afternoon this week caught many girls unprepared and resulted in wet clothes and bags.

Farewell Mrs Kate Bourke

Mrs Bourke, our well-respected Teachers’ Aide, is leaving us. We thank her for her many years of service to the girls of Barbreck, providing care, support and assistance with their learning. I know that you will join with us in wishing her well with her future endeavours.

Thinking – A New Subject!

This year, ‘Thinking’ was included in the timetable for all Junior School classes as a new subject for one lesson per week. The aim of this subject is to teach girls different ways of thinking and to learn reasoning processes to ‘deepen their understanding of what they are learning’. (Marzano, 1997).

One of the reasoning processes being taught in the Year 4 Thinking lesson is ‘comparing’. The girls were introduced to ‘comparing’ when looking at the similarities and differences between insects and arachnids. During these lessons, the girls noted the physiological differences first.

Insects had six legs while Arachnids had eight. They also learnt that insects had three main body parts, head, thorax and abdomen. In contrast, arachnids had a cephalothorax, a fused head and thorax.

As they began to explore other areas, they began to categorise the information under different criteria or headings – an essential element of more complex comparisons.

After this initial comparison, the girls were given the task of comparing learning at home with learning at school. This led to much discussion and, when it came to determining the criteria for the comparison, the girls were able to put forward four criteria: Learning, Socialisation, Technology and Personal Growth.

While learning about comparisons, the girls also were learning about using a graphic organiser such as a table to store their information, as well as the computer skills associated with tables, colouring cells, formatting and inserting dot points.

Tara’s comparison is set out below and is a fine example of the work achieved in this lesson.