Author Archives: Jade Peartree

IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Meeting at Pembroke Term 3, 2024

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IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Meeting

Term 3, 2024

PD Hours 1:00-4:00pm (3 hours)

Presented by Nikki Abdilla, EAL/D Teacher at Pembroke

Many thanks to Pembroke School and Nikki Abdilla for hosting our IPSHA EAL/D Group Meeting today. It was wonderful to be in her teaching space and learn about Pembroke’s setting and strategies to support the EAL/D community.

Here are a few notes from the presentation today as well as some great resources that were shared.

How EAL/D Students are Selected for Support at Pembroke:

  • Student Admissions Team
  • Interviews with Head of Junior School and EAL/D Teacher
  • Meeting with Enrolments once per term to identify potential EAL/D support needs.
  • Flags from classroom, specialists and Inclusive Education Teachers,
  • Referral System: Intranet, online forms
  • Oral Assessments- ELC-Year One and New Arrivals.

New Student Interview Process:

  • Interview Proformas at enrolment that are specific to EAL/D students and families.
  • Ask for a copy of their EAL Interview Form, use in own setting
  • Enrolment Form Example 

Assessments:

  • Oral Assessments- ELC, Year 1 & New Arrivals or Graduates of Intensive English Programs.
  • Using a visual tool, pictures, can they identify nouns, use prepositions, retell events they have experiences, make connections to the images etc.
  • Written Assessments Year 1- Year 6
  • LEAP Levels

Feedback for Teachers:

  • Areas of Success/ Areas of Concern
  • Traffic Light System
  • Lesson Structure:
    • 2-3 lessons per week.
    • Lessons are explicit, targeted, goal driven, hands on and engaging.
    • Programmes- individual goals from assessments
    • Vocabulary and a Grammar focus for each lesson.
    • Expressive and receptive language opportunities each lesson.
    • TRUST: Safe environment to take risks building connections.
    • Humour, relationships (consecutive years)
    • Needs of students have dictated change with number of support lessons and types of lessons, including social (connection) needs.
    • Photo to insert from iPad

     

  • Activities:
    • Practical and hands on activities- cooking
    • Sorts and Games

Communication Tools:

One of my greatest take-aways from today’s session was learning about using subtitles and translation tools available for us in real time using PowerPoint presentations. Imagine using this resource in parent information evenings, parent interviews and as downloadable screen recordings to be viewed and accessed by the community. Brilliant!

  • In PowerPoint, using subtitles in PowerPoint, translated subtitles will appear when you read this screen aloud in presentation mode.
  • Google Translate
  • Using in PTI’s for instant translation in chosen language.
  • Using this in lesson times for students to have translated verbal instructions.
  • Parent Information Evenings, presenting to an audience with translated subtitles. .
  • Screen record the presentation and rewatch the recordings, upload onto Seesaw or QR code generator.

I created an instructional video for how to access subtitles using PowerPoint with live translations.

You can view it here:

Resource Sharing:

Games

  • Pickles to Penguins
  • Sentence Scramblers
  • Articulate for Kids
  • Granny’s Candies

Resources:

I would love to create some sets of vocabulary packs for my school setting that can be used by classroom teachers across varying year levels. Ideally these packs would include vocabulary that students will need for their units of inquiry. This is something I would like to action in 2025.

EALD in the Middle and Senior School at Pembroke:

  • Pembroke boarding house, a trained EAL teacher comes to tutor students Yrs 7-12 in groups or 1:1, 5 hours once a week.
  • Pembroke Connect Program (staff trained in Intensive English)
  • English lessons in China has been reduced. Covid also saw students having 2-3 years of online learning, this has impacted their levels of literacy.

NAPLAN:

  • Students who have been in Australia for less than a year can be exempt from NAPLAN.
  • The forms are online and translated in many different languages.
  • Parent consent is required.
  • Be proactive in this process, get the forms completed early.

As always it was lovely to spend the afternoon engaging with my EAL/D colleagues and sharing insights and resources together.

Thanks Nikki and Pembroke for hosting us today.

So many great resources.

Much appreciation.

EAL/D Demonstration Lesson: Why Dogs Are So Cute!

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Wednesday 20th March 2024

IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Hub Meeting Term 1, 2024

Hi Everyone,

How do we identify quality teaching and learning in EAL/D? Discuss

As we know, what is good for EAL/D learners is good for all English learners. Classroom teachers can use these strategies to assist all learners in their classroom and provide the supports, scaffolds and useful resources to engage and assist learning during English lessons.

What would you say are the top 5 ingredients to a successful learning experience? Discuss.

My Top 5 Ingredients:

  1. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning: What are we trying to achieve through this lesson? Knowing the goals, the learning intentions and success criteria to ensure you are clear about your lesson objectives and how students will be able to demonstrate their abilities. How will this be assessed? What are we looking for?
  2. Knowing the content and how to teach it: Professional Knowledge to create content, provide relevant resources, suitable content for student engagement. Do you have all of the facts and relevant tools/ resources to use for student success?
  3. Knowing your students and how they learn: Nobody knows your students better than you! Knowing your class and their specific needs, you will be able to plan for them to be successful in their own way, is this lesson accessible for all? What scaffolds will be required, who will need more assistance to access this lesson, who will require extension? How will I differentiate and offer different levels so that all can feel and achieve success?
  4. Create and maintain a supportive and safe learning environment: Do we have what we need in our environment to give students options to learn in their way? Varied spaces, learning zones, areas to work independently or as a group. Do we have agreements and expectations about how we work together? Creating a safe learning environment will allow students to feel able to take risks, problem solve and collaborate, push themselves out of their comfort zone, without fear of judgement or criticism.
  5. Student Engagement and Fun! Have you given the children choices to learn in a way that suits them? Do you have resources for visual or hands on learners? Are there elements of play or individual creativity? How are you providing the opportunity for student voice and choice?  Is this lesson fun? If not fun, maybe interesting, sparking curiosity, creating a challenge that is intriguing… etc Are the students engaged?

Below is a demonstration lesson I planned for St Peter’s Girls. I was provided with the Learning Intention and Success Criteria. I knew I would be teaching a group of twelve Year 4 students and there would be girls with varying levels of English proficiency.

  • Learning intention:

We are learning about foregrounding and how to use attention grabbing information to begin a paragraph.

  • Success Criteria:

I can use foregrounding to write a paragraph on “Dogs are cute”.

As I didn’t know my students, I brought along many varying levels of resources about dogs, some digital, some printed books and translating tools on my iPad.

Some of you have just seen this presentation at the IPSHA EAL/D Collegial Hub Meeting at St Peter’s Girl’s School.  As promised, here are the resources I used in the lesson:

PowerPoint: Dogs Are So Cute!

Booklet Resources:

You can view the video of my PPT presentation below:

Here is also the video link to the video clip about Pip, the guide dog:

Enjoy

I hope you find these resources useful, feel free to download and adapt to suit your needs.

Thanks

Please leave me feedback in the comments below.

Kind regards

Jade Peartree

URStrong PD

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URStrong PD 

Thursday 25th January 2024, (7 hours)

 

Presented by Tyson Greenwood & Donna Longden

Friendology: Friendship is a basic need.

URStrong Website with Resources: https://urstrong.com/members/

Padlet for resources: https://padlet.com/dlongden/st-andrew-s-school-6sfi2m652lfhx2sj

Session 1: The Science of Friendship

Why Friendships are so important: when friendships flourish in schools, children are happy to come to school and they are ready to learn. Healthy friendships help us to fly. Harmony in schools, empowered by skills and choices for healthier relationships, ultimately children feel better about themselves, self-compassion, healthy mindsets. Skills for relationships throughout life.

Gender Stereotypes: Myths & Truths.

The power of whole-school friendship strategy. Child friendly language, consistent approach across the school.

Reflection:

Before students can learn they must feel safe, trust, valued by self and others.

Session 2: Friendship Ninjas


Some students come to school with unrealistic expectations of friendships. This helps to simplify what to expect and how to navigate through what a friendship entails.

Using the Friend-O-Meter as a tool with your students to assess how their friendships make them feel.

 

Session 3: 

Conflict in friendship: Conflict must be normalised in schools. Teach students to face conflicts head on. We were raised to avoid conflict, we don’t know how to have difficult conversations. This is not the same for our students. They are being raised in a different time.

Friendship Fire vs Mean on Purpose:  

Usually 85% of friendship issues are Friendship Fires, its only 15% of Mean on Purpose. A friendship fire is something that happens when we have conflicts in friendships. These are normal to experience and happen frequently.

Mean on purpose is intentionally cruel and mean behaviour that was meant to hurt someone else.

We use the Friend-O-Cycle to give them skills to put out Friendship Fires and repair the friendship. When we ignore friendship fires, they get worse.

 

Where do students go to resolve a problem and talk it out? Talk it out bench, talk it out couch, break out room to have these conversations with friends.

Quick Comeback, is a short statement that won’t get them in trouble to use when someone is being mean on purpose. Examples: Stop, Not Cool, No, etc.

Talk It Out: Retell the situation, explain how you felt.

Session 4: Friendology 101

Response to Intervention Model: Friendship Skills

Snapshot of each stage.

How to Teach Friendology 101


We don’t introduce the term “Mean on Purpose” until Year 3. Focus on Friendship Fires in JP, students have difficulty differentiating between being mean on purpose or fires, so we leave this until later.

There are 8 sessions per stage. Every stage has a Tricky Situations session, this assists with real life examples in the classroom that students can relate to and learn from.

We can either play the video where they teach the concepts or you can use the slides where you guide the students and use the prompts

URS-Facilitator-Guide-2021

Session 5: Becoming a URStrong School/ Implementation

Reflect on Alignment

Plan for your Audience

Launch for Success.

Hosting a Day of Friendship: Ideas on the Padlet.

Afternoon Session:

Circle Time Activity led by Anthea Khutagt (Year 4 Teacher)

Today Anthea shared a classroom strategy that she has used with her students Reception to Year 6. I have also used sharing circles before but this one had a few differences which I think would work well.

Here is a template to use for the circle time, it must have a yes and no answer and all students.

Feel free to use this template to edit and suit your class. You can generate questions based on your inquiry, classroom issues, student interests and even get the children involved in creating questions for circle time.

Circle Time Template

Tyson Greenwood’s final session:

Relationships matter, building relationships with your students matters, children want to be connected in their classroom, they want to know you and they want you to know them. Connection makes relationships and learning meaningful.

I really enjoyed the PD today and am looking forward to using URStrong across the school.

RAP: Reconciliation Action Plan at St Andrew’s School

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Professional Development Reflections Term 3, 2022.

RAP WALK

Tuesday 7th June, 2022. 3:45-5:00pm

On the 7th of June, 2022, the staff at St Andrew’s were given time to explore the ways in which other staff are making Indigenous Australian cultures and perspectives visually represented in our school. We were able to take our own school tour to showcase ways in which we are implementing our school’s RAP (Reconciliation Action Plan).

We were asked to reflect on the following:

  • How do we show we RESPECT First Nations histories and cultures?
  • How do we show we provide OPPORTUNITIES for learning about First Nations histories and cultures?
  • How do we show we engage the wider community and create RELATIONSHIPS with First Nations people in our community?

Here is a slideshow of some of the photos of the spaces at St Andrew’s School, which I took to document and reflect on.

Here is a copy of our RAP Book for Children, it has so many wonderful resources and guiding questions and reflections to use during inquiry in the classroom.

RAP CHILDRENS BOOK_.1

I am very proud to work at a school with professionals who make so much effort to ensure cultures are represented and respected and that students feel comfortable to ask questions, be respectful and inclusive of others.

Recently the Year 6 students have spent time and effort creating a Reconciliation Garden. They were supported by their teacher, Cerys Phillips and Learning Assistant, Lorena Mortimer. Here are some photos of the garden, the signage went up over the school holidays.  Very proud of the actions our staff and students are taking at St Andrews.

A lot of credit can be given to Cerys Phillips, one of our Year 6 teachers, and the current Coordinator of Diversity and Equity at St Andrew’s. She is constantly sharing resources, awareness, key dates and creating content for staff and students to use in the classroom. I thank her for her passion in this area of the school. What we do and how we do it, matters. Thankful to work in a culturally inclusive school.