Primary Principal Update – Science, Mathematics and Early Intervention

Dear Parents,

Here is a picture of some of your children thanking you for helping them during Spirit Week just before the break. Thank you also to the PTFA for organizing this year’s School Fair. Your children benefit hugely from your positive involvement with the school. We look forward to welcoming all parents to our first Open Primary Share on Friday, November 4 th . This will be an opportunity for you to freely walk around the Primary School visiting any classroom between 13:30 and 14:30. More details will be forwarded in due course.

Early Intervention: We would like to warmly welcome Ms. Karli Walsh who begins working in Lower Primary this week. Karli will be working alongside teachers, assistants and children from preschool to second grade helping to improve student learning. She will identify individual needs and intervene early when necessary so that all students with their different levels of readiness continue to be challenged and engaged.

Science and Mathematics: This year, we have been reviewing our science and mathematics curriculum in order to improve student learning in these areas.

Mathematics: We aim to raise current levels of proficiency as well as existing learning expectations in some fundamental mathematical skills. This specifically includes

•  Improving understanding of place value by accurately counting, reading and writing numbers.
•  Improving proficiency in recalling basic number facts.
•  Improving ability to compute effectively using all four number operations.

It is understood that these objectives do not stand apart from the conceptual framework of our programme. Instead, we hope that they will support critical thinking skills across the discipline. Over the next two months, Ms. Yunita will be working with all children from grade 1 to grade 5 to try and kick start this process.

Science: During the first term, we compared our learning expectations to those of other school systems from around the world, looked at our transition between primary and secondary and evaluated the balance and coherence of our overall programme. We are currently in the process of implementing some goals from the resulting action plan. These include,

• Addressing some perceived knowledge gaps in curricular documents
• Delivering essential knowledge in both lower and upper primary
• Providing more sustained exposure to science investigative skills

As with language and mathematics, the science curriculum will be available on our classroom blogs in due course so that parents can view our learning expectations. We want our students to view science as organized curiosity.

As always, thank you to everyone for your ongoing support.

Warm regards,

Alan Lorenzini