Focus Background

Focus background:

I have noticed that the cohort which have come from Y5 are developmentally far behind the other
two year level students. They have had little to no exposure to writing for any other purpose other
than recount. The Y7 students have begun working on writing for purpose, however, they still cannot
independently identify the needs for each genre of writing. The Y8 students have had a good
background in writing across a range of purposes, however, Y8A has been identified due to his
tendency to “do as he is told” which clearly demonstrates he can’t understand “writing for purpose.
In Maths there is a big gap in their knowledge and strategies - due in part to ESOL students coming
from an overseas education focus on algorithm and learning process rather than strategies. During
GloSS testing, I noticed that most of the children simply lacked the language to explain their processes.
There is an obvious opportunity to fill in gaps in areas such as geometry, time, measurement and times
tables.

Our school focus for this year is to develop CRITICAL THINKING among students. The focus for our
CoL is LANGUAGE.