Junior Classroom

Junior Primary:

The Junior Primary classroom is a safe and welcoming place to learn, built through positive relationships. Our learning community comprises students from Reception to Year 3, with differentiated tasks catering for enriching, multi-level learning opportunities.

We promote class values of resilience, persistence and inclusion, where students embrace learning challenges and can confidently try their best. Through this, we aim to build responsible, respectful and resilient learners who achieve to their full potential.

Curriculum:

Our learning program is based on the South Australian Curriculum with a strong focus on Literacy and Numeracy.

Our Literacy Block provides engagement for students in the areas of phonics, spelling, reading and writing, primarily using the Orton Gillingham approach. In addition we use the model of Talk 4 Writing, with reference to The Writing Revolution, including a clear understanding of Scarborough’s Reading Rope.

The numeracy block after recess provides students with opportunities to build arithmetic fluency, practice learned skills, and learn new content in an explicit way. Every lesson begins with five minutes of fluency work using single digits and the four operations. Each student works at their own level and we celebrate everybody’s successes. This is followed by a 15 minute daily review of previously learned content and opportunities to practice in an interleaved fashion, allowing students to retrieve skills from their memory bank across the year. We then move to new learning, which is supported by EMP – the Explicit Mathematics Program – which teaches mathematics in a highly structured and initially scaffolded design, gradually releasing students to build competency as they move from the acquisition stage to fluency, generalisation and adaptation.

Parent Communication:

Regular communication with parents and carers is important to Palmer Primary School. Parent/Teacher meetings occur in Terms 1 and 3, and student reports are sent home at the end of Terms 2 and 4. The Class Dojo app is used in the Upper Primary class as a means of sharing students’ work with their parents. It also provides a means of communication between parents and teachers through direct messaging.

Thank you,

Bec Stewart

Junior Primary Teacher