Excellent staff,
motivated pupils and participative families working together to provide an
inclusive, quality education - making Pinelands North Primary a leading
school on which other schools model themselves.
It
is that time again... We are UPGRADING!
Apologies if you do not find
what you are looking for, come back again soon or email us and it is sure to be here
next time!
News
Parent interviews this
week
If you read your child’s report with dread
last term, and are wondering how to improve the results, make sure you have
made an appointment to see your child’s teacher on Thursday afternoon. From
13h30 on Thursday, staff are seeing parents so if you haven’t had a request
to attend, but still wish to be there, please contact the staff member
concerned via your child’s homework diary or message book.
Interact
As mentioned in the last newsletter, we will be collecting beanies for the
babies at Mowbray Maternity. It is the perfect opportunity to teach your
children how to knit, and make it a fun family activity!
We are noticing more and more that children today cannot answer examination
questions. We believe this is because children seldom need to use their
imaginations – they get their ‘stories’ from television, and even if they
read or are read to, the books have pictures, usually in colour, and they
don’t need to imagine very much at all.
When setting formal assignments, tests or examinations, our staff use Bloom’s Taxonomy. Other schools
might use different ones but essentially they all provide questions at
different levels, making papers more interesting and varied.
Bloom’s taxonomy has six
different levels, from easy to complicated. The levels are: Knowledge,
Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation. Our papers are
set using one third of questions at the first two levels, one third at the
next and then the final third at the top. The idea then is that two thirds
of the pupils should get the first two thirds, and that only a few will be
able to answer the final third of the paper.
The reason I am explaining all this is because I know parents spend time
helping their children to learn. If you know the type of questions to ask,
you could be asking higher order questions too, to train them in answering!
This does not apply only to the grades learning for tests – if parents, in
conversation with their children about everyday things, asked these types of
questions, conversations would be more fruitful and children would have
experience in thinking in these ways.
So how do you find out what questions to ask? Research Bloom’s Taxonomy on
the internet because there are lots of sites which give good information. (I
used Google and there are too many to print!) I have enclosed the June (2009) Grade 6
Science examset by Bev Pereira, using these levels. She has
indicated next to each question, the level which is being tested. The other
enclosure is from
www.teachers.ash.org.au/researchskills/Dalton.htm If you want to
know more about setting tests, ask your child’s teacher.
Discuss formal assessments with your child – ask about the type of questions
they find difficult and use this information in discussion at a future
opportunity. If our grade one pupils started thinking like this, imagine
what they will be able to achieve in the future!
