Carmel McGrath 

Learning from Home

Thank you to all our staff for working across the weekend as we began preparation for this extended lockdown period.  Thank you to all parents for your patience and positive feedback on how staff have worked so quickly to send home learning materials and communications via Dojo, Seesaw and email / Schoolzine. 

Due to the extension of the lockdown until 4pm Sunday 8 August 2021, the following arrangements will remain in place:

• Students of essential workers or vulnerable students can continue to attend school for supervised learning.
• Students of non-essential workers will continue to have access to remote learning. 

Your child’s teacher will continue to be your main point of contact during this time. In order to keep our staff safe, we will operate with a minimal staff at school as of today Wed 4th August.  Your teacher will predominantly be working from home but communicating in the usual manner via Dojo and Seesaw.  If you have any specific concerns, please contact Head Of Department (Curriculum) Melinda Norman mnorm36@eq.edu.au to discuss this further.

In addition to materials provided by your child’s teacher, students are also able to access a range of educational resources on the department’s learning@home website.

Students at school and home will be completing the same curriculum. Those at school will be supervised by relief staff on a rotation basis rather than their usual class teacher. 

Excursions and Incursions – All sports and extra-curricular activities are cancelled at this stage.

Evacuation drill – we have postponed this week’s drill and will reschedule following the lockdown. 

Staff Update

During the first 2 days this week, staff have been preparing curriculum materials / videos/ lessons for online learning, undertaking training in Seesaw, posting Dojo communications, and establishing staff management procedures. The class teachers remain your first point of contact and if your teacher is ill or absent, the ongoing curriculum will be supplied by another teacher in the same year level.

We will have a staff member in the office and an administrator daily if you have any general enquiries. Otherwise we will be working from home.

I stress that for the safety of all our community that all adults continue to wear masks at all times and parents not to enter the school unless absolutely necessary, such as collecting a sick child.  

Reminders

As per the P&C news below, a reminder to all families that the Tuckshop is closed this week due to the lockdown.

Parents and Carers please make sure you have the Qld Check In App downloaded.

Judy Loudon

I feel blessed to have supported students with various sensory, communication and social/emotional challenges through the Year 5 camp last week. I’m so very proud of the effort they made to fully participate in activities such as the night hike and mud challenge course. I’m also very proud of the collective efficacy and inclusive mindsets of our staff. Team work certainly makes the dream work. 

The City Cluster Mini Festivals for students with gifts/talents were successful. We had students participating in a range of activities from coding, visual art, media art, mathematics and writing across many schools. Our own Innovation Coach, Mr Fenton, lead the coding mini-festival here. We have 5 staff in the process of completing their Gifted Education Mentor training and are raising staff awareness of aspects of identifying and adjusting for students with this diverse learning need.  

After our successful presentation at the Qld Special Education Leaders conference in June, we are also sharing our presentation at the upcoming regional PBL Share Fair. We are also sharing our systems and practices with other local schools. 

This Thursday I am presenting at the Early Years Network at Newstead. I look forward to helping future families understand the importance of having an inclusive mindset and the way that schools differentiate for their students.  

Sandy Chambers 

AT A GLANCE WORDS - RED WORDS  

Your child might talk about ‘Red Words’ when they are reading their RWI home readers. These are common words that contain tricky letter / spelling patterns and are difficult to Fred Talk (sound out). We say “It’s hard to Fred a Red”.  

English has 26 letters to make up 44 sounds. Many of these 44 sounds have multiple spellings. There are over 180 spellings that make up all the words in English. There are so many, that Ruth Miskin only puts the most common ones on our Speed Sounds chart. She says that a spelling has to be worth it to make it onto the chart - in other words, you’ll find it in lots of words.  

You may have seen these Red Words come home in previous years to be learnt at home as “Sight Words”. We now call these words “At A Glance Words” or “Instantly Recalled Words” because we teach our students how to read and learn these words in our daily RWI lessons by identifying the tricky letter/s for them. For example: - In said, the tricky letters are ‘ai’ (the sensible letter would be ‘e’) - In son, the tricky letter is ‘o’ (the sensible letter would be ‘u’) - In your, the tricky letters are ‘our’ (the sensible letters would be ‘or’). There are a few Red Words with an asterisk. This indicates that the word is only ‘Red for a while.’ For example, ‘he’ becomes a Green Word (a decodable word) once children know ‘e’ can represent ee.  

We need the children to read Red Words speedily, so they don’t have to stop and think about them for long. For this reason, we do send a list of Red Words home to practice but we make sure the children have been taught them at school first and can identify the tricky letters for themselves. We do not want children to receive a list of Red Words to learn ‘by sight’ at home. 

Watch the following selection of Red Word lessons from different books to see how we teach Red Words at school. Please note: the videos will only be able to be viewed for a few weeks before the link disappears. 

Red Words in Ditty - https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/l1A3WZ1A/BN7bCYmv 

Red Words in Green Books - https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/paQPr82f/BFDfitbo 

Red Words in Pink Books - https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/nTqgJ2vj/YTdr1s9Q 

Red Words in Blue Books - https://schools.ruthmiskin.com/training/view/jYuTyCWJ/RoFA0R3d 

School cleaning allocations and standards 

State schools have high standards of well-established hygiene protocols and cleaning of their facilities. In response to COVID-19, the Queensland Government has approved a temporary increase in cleaning time allocated to state schools. 

This action has been taken to allow for even greater attention and frequency to cleaning activity in schools, particularly for high touch points including administration buildings, classrooms and amenities blocks. In line with previous advice, it is important that these areas are given focus with the application of the high priority cleaning protocols.  

Additional cleaning is to be implemented until further notice. School cleaning must prioritise frequently used areas with extra attention on high touch point surfaces, such as door handles, light switches, desks, toilets, taps and sinks. This also includes sick rooms and student service areas 

Shared equipment 

Shared equipment such as practical workshop resources, musical instruments and sports equipment used within the school, or equipment loaned to students to take home, such as books, will require appropriate cleaning and hygiene management practices including: 

• washing hands or using hand sanitiser prior to cleaning or using equipment 
• cleaning equipment prior to and after use 
• clean playground equipment and other high touch points 

• cleaning of equipment prior to it leaving the school grounds and upon return. 

Cleaning playground equipment 

Playground equipment is considered to be low risk and therefore can continue to be used. However, as part of our broader health and hygiene approach, a number of simple precautions should be taken: 

• ensure children wash their hands with soap or use hand sanitiser before and after using playground equipment and build this as part of their routine 
• actively manage group/class size using play equipment at any one time to avoiding overcrowding 

• regularly clean play equipment.