The furniture and classroom spaces at St Mary's provide for engaging spaces for both students and teachers to work. On entering the classrooms, the furniture is amazing! There are very few desks in the room and the style of furniture changes between stages. In the Kinder cohort, there are lots of cushioned stools, tables and chairs, semi circle style lounges and fantastic 3 tiered seating in the centre of the room. The stage 3 room consisted of bar stool style swivel seating, high benches and booths.
Children in all cohorts have a space to put their belongings (generally in tubs) but there is not 1 desk and 1 chair for each student like in traditional style classrooms. This furniture set up allows children to choose their own individual or group workspace depending on the task. For some activities teachers direct students to a work area, such as for literacy groups, but for other activities such as independent tasks or inquiry based groups, students make their own choices of where to work. In the case where students are not engaged in the task or are disruptive, they may still be directed to work in another space. However, with the layout of the room and the tasks being engaging and differentiated to student needs, behaviour problems are few and far between!
Students also have access to portable ICT devices such as chrome books and iPads to help them best access the curriculum anywhere in the learning space. In kinder iPads were used for literacy group independent activities where the children read PM readers and then went on to a teacher made file of appropriate apps. In year 5 and 6 google earth was being used on iPads to find out further information about ecosystems in Australia.
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