Day Three at Star of the Sea by Lyn, Erin, Suzie and Kerrily

 What will we take home with us?

When first entering any classroom at Star of the Sea, the behaviour management visual (diamond visual above) is a prominent feature. It uses child-friendly language, it is very bright and colourful and puts the responsibility onto each individual learner. All students begin each day by placing their name in the green section, indicating they are ready to learn. They have the opportunity to move into other sections depending on their work habits throughout the day (a fresh start, for each child each day). The behaviour management poster was designed by the staff and then professionally produced for each classroom. The shape was a deliberate choice, as it is a balanced shape and the colours were specifically chosen to represent the different levels of emotion. It would be great to adopt something similar to this in our own schools as a whole school approach to behaviour management. We would make minor adaptions such as using photos of each child, rather than names only as this would assist casual teachers. Boardmaker visuals could be used to assist all students, in particular verified students, to help them achieve social behaviours. 

Star of the Sea has a unique reading program whereby the children take home a selection of three texts, including one they can read independently, one to be read to (by a parent) and one to read with someone who is a more competent  reader. One of these must be an info graphic. The school recognises the need to make connections to the real-world where they read everyday items, such as food packaging, brochures, catalogues, travel brochures, receipts and tickets. Each packet has a series of comprehension questions to assist the child with literal and inferential comprehension. This is an inexpensive resource and easily accessible, made by staff and senior students. This would be a great resource in light of the new English syllabus and the use of real-world multi-modal texts. (There are no levelled home readers sent home).

As part of the Design Thinking Process, an immersion box is used to ignite conversation and stimulate interest in the topic to be studied. The students have to guess what the topic will be as they won't be given the name of the topic at the beginning of the unit. We thought we could take this idea back to our own classrooms as a way to evoke curiosity and conversation, led by the students, when introducing future inquiry units.

As you can see from yesterday's blog we feel that we would like to further investigate the Design Thinking approach in relation to the Inquiry Learning Method used in our classrooms. For further professional readings on Design Thinking; http://notosh.com/ 

 
 
 

 
 
 

Robotics is used throughout the school as part of the Technology aspect of the Science Curriculum and to support work in Mathematics. The Bee Bots resource is used from Prep to Year 2. This resource can also be used as an I pad app; Bee Bots. In Stage 2, the App Scratch Junior is used to further enhance this program. The Stage 3 children use Mind Storms Education Robotic Lego kits to make robots which they program to move via different modes e.g. sensory, movement, visual. The culmination of the student's learning is displayed when they take part in a robotics competition based in South East Queensland.