Upper Classroom
At Palmer Primary School the Upper Primary class includes students from Year 3 to Year 6. We aim to provide a knowledge-rich curriculum using explicit instruction across all subjects. Students are encouraged to take responsibility for their learning, to strive for their very best, and respect other learners around them. Students are given opportunities to be curious, resilient, and persistent with their learning.
Curriculum
There is a strong focus on numeracy and literacy at Palmer Primary School. We believe in using proven best-practice strategies grounded in reviewed and replicated research.
The first learning block of the day is focused on literacy, beginning with streamed Orton-Gillingham lessons which include aspects of phonics, morphology and vocabulary using a multi-sensory approach to better facilitate long-term learning. After this we regroup as a class to focus on strengthening reading and writing skills, building background knowledge, thinking about grammar and punctuation while studying various texts and genres. Students are encouraged to read aloud every day to an adult to hone fluency and comprehension.
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 everyone is encouraged to 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 delivered explicitly following principles of atomisation, allowing intricate knowledge to learn through 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.
Please feel free to contact me if you would like any other information about the upper class.
Kind regards,
Liz Young
