Week 8 - Term 2

Dear families,

We are nearing the end of term 2, and everyone is looking forward to a well deserved break! I am proud of what we have been able to achieve in the first half of the year, and of the resilience of our staff and students.

As previously mentioned, student reports will be sent home at the end of week 10. I encourage you to read and discern these summative reports, and to make time to follow up with your child’s teachers, into term 3.

Last Wednesday, our year 4 students and their families gathered to celebrate their Confirmation. In our catholic tradition, there are a number of stages of initiation into full participation in the church. The journey begins with Baptism, followed by Reconciliation. Confirmation is then followed by Eucharist. It was a wonderful celebration, and the spirit of God was strongly present in our children and families. My sincere thanks to Mrs Angela DeNadai, our APRIM, who worked in close partnership with Fr Michael Trainor our Parish priest and Joan Walsh our Pastoral Associate in bringing the celebration to life. Oure fantastic year 4 teachers, Chantal Driver, Christie-Lee Hansberry and James Goldy, did a great job of preparing our candidates and they all shone on the night!

Over the past few weeks, the Leadership team has been meeting regularly with our Architects, Stallard Meek Flightpath, to develop the design concept for stage one of our Master Plan. We are at an exciting point in the development of this process, and hopefully you will have seen our recent Facebook post highlighting this work. As we enter into semester two, families will hear and see a lot more about the development of this building program-there are exciting times ahead!

Next Friday, our transition students will ‘graduate’ in readiness for commencing reception in term 3! This is an exciting time for these children and their families, and we can’t wait to welcome our 20th class, in term 3! Sincere thanks to Ms Diem Savy for her leadership of the program. Diem will become a full time member of our teaching staff once term 3 commences. 

Our talented year 6 band will take part in the Nazareth College “Battle of the Bands” next Wednesday evening. The children have been rehearsing regularly in recent times and they sound awesome! My Thanks to Olivia Bozzon for her leadership of the band program.

Over the next few days, some of our year 5 and 6 students will take part in two competitions-The Crows Cup and  the “Westies Cup” football competitions. We wish all players every success, and thanks to Mr Daley and Mr Goldy for bringing these opportunities to life!

The last day of term 2 will be Thursday July 7. On Friday, our teaching staff will continue their professional learning in implementing our Literacy program, based around the Science of Reading, before going on a well-earned holiday break!

Have a great week everyone.
God bless,
Phil

During the pupil free day Friday 10^th, our staff took part in a day of sharing practice and developing knowledge around Science of Reading. Each year level team presented a ‘lesson’ around a different spelling rule. I thought you might find it interesting to learn about some of the spelling rules and concepts that are being explicitly taught here at St Francis!

Our Reception teachers led us through a lesson around when to spell the (k) sound with a ‘k’ and when to use a ‘c’.  C and K make the same sound – so how do we know which one to use when? Just ask your child, they will be able to tell you:

Next, our Year 2 teachers taught us when to use ‘ck’ as a spelling choice. For this spelling rule, it was helpful to have some prior knowledge of a rule taught earlier in our sequence: We use ‘ff’, ‘ll’, ‘ss’ and ‘zz’ at the end of a 1 syllable word after a short vowel. The Year 2 teachers then led us through a series of slides to help us see that we can add ‘ck’ to this rule.

The Year 3 teachers started with a song! Yes, Mr Bowman gave us a clue as to the concept by singing a ‘Queen’ song – you guessed it, the concept was the spelling of the sound (kw). Did you know that ‘qu’ is pronounced with 2 speech sounds? The letters ‘qu’ together spell the sound (kw). Ask your child how to pronounce this sound – it does take a bit of practice because we are so used to adding a schwa sound to this one!

We next had a refresher lesson on ‘Closed Syllables’ and were then taught about ‘Open Syllables’ by the Year 4 team (my team!). Did you know that there are 6 Syllable types? These are just the first 2 types that we teach.

Examples of Closed Syllables are cat, pup and the first syllable in bot-tle. Examples of Open Syllables are she, my and the first syllable in pa-per. *Did you remember that y is a sometimes vowel and is making the vowel sound (I) in the open syllable ‘my’?

How are you going with these rules so far? Do you know them all? Does any of it sound familiar? Did you learn to spell this way?

The last spelling concept that we learnt about was from the Year 1 team. They taught us another syllable type – Consonant le Syllables. These are the final syllable in 2 or more syllable words where there is a consonant followed by ‘le’. We also learnt how to break Consonant le syllables up. Can you see that ‘puzzle’ is split in a certain way so that the first syllable ‘puz’ is a closed syllable (short vowel sound) and the last syllable ‘zle’ is a consonant le syllable?

After lunch – it was the Year 6 team’s turn to teach a lesson. We moved from phonology and phonics (sounds and symbols) to morphology (structure and meaning of parts of words). The Year 6 team led us through a lesson about changing verbs to past tense by adding the suffix ‘ed’. These activities kept us active and thinking even though it was after lunch on a Friday!

As you can see, we covered a lot of content on Friday. These spelling rules and concepts are only a small part of the content that we are explicitly teaching your children each day in our daily Literacy lessons. As teachers, we are working hard to upskill ourselves in these rules before we teach them – having not learnt this way ourselves! We understand now that the evidence and research is clear – teaching phonics systematically, explicitly and cumulatively is key to successful reading and spelling instruction.

So, how did you go understanding these rules and concepts? 

I’d love to know how you went understanding the spelling rules, or how you are going listening to your child/ren talk to you about the rules and concepts that they are learning at school. Send me an email if you have any feedback or questions. chansberry@sflockleys.catholic.edu.au

I’m hoping to organise a parent meeting later this year where I go through some of these rules and concepts in more detail.

Until then, keep reading!

Christie-Lee Hansberry