4.2_Cheryl+H

Cheryl H

Hi everyone, I hope you all had a restful and relaxing break ready for a huge Term 4! Welcome to my page. I hope you find it useful and interesting. Please feel free to comment. I’d love your feedback and ideas.

__ My role at our school __

After analysis of our 2010 SMART data it was determined that writing was not only a priority for our region but also our school in 2011. It was decided that our school needed to improve teacher’s capacity to teach writing. We have done this by providing the support of an additional classroom teacher in a team teaching/mentoring capacity. Through this initiative our aim was to embrace the “Quality Teaching Framework”, whilst embedding the principles of the Teaching & Learning Cycle into daily practice. I am fortunate enough to have been offered this role and have been working in this capacity all year for 2 days a week and by the end of the year I will have worked in every classroom. From the outset we have used the T & L Cycle of pretest, teach and post-test. I work in conjunction with the classroom teachers to determine the learning outcomes and content based on the results of the pretest and I create the lessons sequences, integrated with class themes and other KLAs where possible. **__The students __** My focus for this project is year 4, which is my home class on the other 3 days, when I’m not teaching writing. This is a job share. **__Conceptual Focus __** -  I like to teach writing through rich literature by modeling and adapting an author’s style. During book week our school had a visit from Western Australian author Mark Greenwood, who presented several of his Australian historical fiction picture books, his most recent being the Legend of Lassiter’s Reef, which tied in neatly with our work on “Our Fleeting Past”. This author reinforced so much of what I was teaching at the time, that this text became the focus of the next few lessons. The language is really striking! Coincidently, the reporter Paul Lochyer was researching the history of Lassiter’s Reef when he was fatally injured a couple of months ago, which provided further interest to the students **__Assessment Task __** During terms 2 and 3, Stage 2 studied the COGs unit ‘Our Fleeting Past’. Because of the duration of the unit, students gained a deep understanding about life at this time. Our students visited Elizabeth farm and Old Government House, where they dressed up and took on a convict character, which they had been assigned several weeks prior to the excursion. The assessment task was to write a narrative based on their experiences and background knowledge about a day in the life of a convict with the view of writing and illustrating it, to read to their buddy class next door. We used the same assessment rubric for the pretest and post test to asses growth.
 * __ Background Information __**

 