Charleville School of Distance Education
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Parry Street
Charleville QLD 4470
Subscribe: https://charlevillesde.schoolzineplus.com/subscribe

Email: the.principal@charlevisde.eq.edu.au
Phone: 07 4656 8999
Fax: 07 4656 8900

December 2021

Newsletter Articles

Principals Ponderings

Looking back:

As 2021 draws to a close after ten months of ups and downs, some normalcy and some frustrations, I would like to thank our school community for the parts that you played in the successes of the year.

To our students: thank you for coming to lessons, listening to your teachers, doing as your home tutor has asked, and doing some marvellous learning. Thank you for your efforts in Readers Cup; Secondary campdraft; as school leaders…what a fantastic mob…leading assemblies and awards ceremonies; for the music you play and for the performances in our end of year concert. And for being you.

To our Parents and Home Tutors and those who make up our supportive P&C: we owe you a big round of applause for the work you have done this year in your classroom, at events at school, taking your students to sport, to music and to opportunities in the community and for fundraising, such a massive effort (and a lot of fun I am told!). A special thank you to Robyn and Christie as they leave our school and move on to new school communities, for the Presidential and Secretarial roles you have taken on this year.

To our wonderful staff: I want to thank you for all that you have done, achieved, and been through this year. The extra 1% in all that you do…we have had wonderful growth in early years literacy, students representing the Western Alliance in campdraft, our very clever readers that came second in the state by only a smidgeon of points…and many more successes. All of this occurs when teachers and their support staff, care, encourage, and give. There are some students who we never see and hear from who are not getting the support that they need…but by golly I know my teachers and staff do everything that they can and care very much and do what they can to encourage and support.

Thank you for being there for each other…as we have our own personal ups and downs there is such support behind the scenes.

I want to congratulate you all on the team work, enthusiasm and kindness and for the fabulous performance in our end of year concert.

Congratulations on a wonderful year, full of surprises, great deeds and support.

Thank you all.

Looking forward to 2022:

Kickstart Conference details have been emailed. We look forward to an action-packed conference with activities for students, networking and informative sessions for Home Tutors and a special keynote speaker who will make you feel special and ready for the year. Save the dates: 8th to 11th February.

Staffing:

  • We are farewelling Sue Harvey at the end of the year as she will take up a new position in Toowoomba, and Shane Needer as he takes up a position at the Charleville State High School. Thank you both for your contribution to our school and students and we wish you all the best for your new positions.
  • HOD Secondary: Mandy is coming back 0.4 FTE and Venessa Moore will be acting HOD for the other 0.6 FTE for term one
  • Rebecca Washbrook will return at the beginning of the year (0.4 Diverse Learners’ Teacher and 0.6 teaching secondary)
  • The Technical Officer role has been advertised again and we hope to fill the position early in term one
  • William Lovejoy will continue as Teacher Aide supervising the students at the Thargomindah secondary centre for next year

January 18th: Teachers and support staff commence with Professional development days on the 18th January. The first day will be a full day working with an external presenter and other schools – Teach Like a Champion. This will build on techniques for strong systems and routines and will support academic, behavioural, and cultural systems that drive student engagement and achievement across classrooms

  • Other sessions include mandatory training, reading, 3 big rocks for Western Alliance (Engagement, Curriculum, Inclusion), Annual Performance and Development Plan (all staff), Curriculum and other planning for 2022.
  • Student Code of Conduct and our “On TRACK” expectations will be rolled out through Home Tutor sessions and in classes
  • Secondary students will commence lessons on Thursday 27th January and Primary on 28th January. Home Tutor sessions will be on Monday for Secondary and Thursday for Primary Home Tutors.
  • To facilitate NAPLAN next year, we will have a week of Athletics, NAPLAN, and our Sports Muster. All students will be on line (at home or in Charleville)

Wishing you all a wonderful holiday, with rain as you need it, family and friends. Thank you again for another year and I look forward to an exciting and not too different 2022.

Jenny

Head of Department Teaching and Learning

Head of Department Primary and Secondary: Teaching and Learning

Term Four

Version 8 Curriculum update

We are continuing our quality assurance process and updating our Independent Learning Materials. During Term 1 2022, you will see some resources updated to Version B. Please continue to let your teacher know of any identified errors or feedback regarding the curriculum documents.

Reviewing the Australian Curriculum

We have had the following information confirmed from the department:

Queensland state schools will not implement the revised curriculum (Version 9) in 2022. A decision regarding Queensland’s implementation of the revised Australian Curriculum will be made in consultation with all school sectors and key stakeholders following the release of the final curriculum (Version 9) in 2022.

QELi Developing Capability through Leading Literacy | Term Three

During Week 10, Sarah and I completed the Developing Leadership Capability through Leading Literacy program. The program started in 2019, working in partnership with QELi, the Reading and Writing Centre and The Centre for Learning and Wellbeing. During our final session we had the opportunity to showcase our Literacy project and explore our leadership goals. We reflected on how the team improved their leadership capabilities and literacy outcomes. Finally, we started to think about what is next for our school working towards improving literacy capabilities and outcomes.

Moderation

A whole school approach to moderation processes underpins systematic curriculum delivery and supports teachers to align curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and reporting; and ensures consistency of teacher judgments and accuracy of reporting against the Australian Curriculum achievement standards.

We continue our journey working through the BEFORE, AFTER, AFTER, END Moderation process. Our main focus has been on the BEFORE phase.

WHY:

Moderate to:

  • Develop shared understanding about the intended curriculum and relevant achievement standard.
  • Align pedagogy and curriculum to summative assessment.

WHAT:

  • Clarify key components of the validated unit, endorsed assessment task and marking guide and their alignment to assessable aspects of the standards.
  • Calibrate teacher judgments, using work samples, by identifying the qualities of student work that exemplify the task.

HOW:

  • Identify and clarify the unit intent and assessment purpose and conventions.
  • Follow an agreed upon process to calibrate work samples that identify the qualities of student work that exemplify the task.
  • Review the teaching and learning sequence to determine the learning intentions and success criteria; opportunities to differentiate for student learning needs; literacy and numeracy demands to support student success.

Learning Difficulties Conference

Jessica Carr, Natalie Dare, Jessica Head, Bronwyn Cash, Rosemary Murphy and I were very fortunate to attend the Biennial Joint Conference for Learning Difficulties hosted by SPELD, LSTAQ and LDA at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. A key message from the conference was delivered by Professor Pamela Snow (School of Education, La Trobe University, Bendigo), addressing Oral language skills and reading success: Leveraging the Simple View of Reading in primary and secondary classrooms. “Explicit teaching of alphabetic decoding skills is helpful for all children, harmful for none, and CRUCIAL for some” (Snow and Juel, 2005).

We also heard from Mrs Toni Hatten-Roberts (GOGlearn) exploring Using the science of learning to teach all students. She spoke about explicit instruction quoting Rosenshein, “The terms explicit teaching or direct instruction are summary terms for recent findings on effective teaching. They refer to a systematic method of teaching with emphasis on proceeding in small steps, checking of understanding and achieving active and successful participation by all students”. She noted - When educators understand the reason why the strategy works – it’s no longer associated with a teaching philosophy or a program or an anecdotal belief… It shifts from being a type of teaching – and becomes a cognitive necessity to improving learning for all our students.

Inclusive Teaching of Reading and Writing

Promoting Literacy Development – Professional Development

All of our primary teachers and diverse learners’ teachers have completed two professional development days. The courses have been developed by Diana Rigg (Senior Speech Pathologist) to allow teachers to access evidence-based professional learning in Literacy. The courses outline processes which enable teachers to work effectively with a range of ability and be flexible enough to devise a process that matches student ability.

Moving forward our Year 2 students will continue to roll out our Literacy Skills lessons in 2022. Year 3 students will be timetabled a 30-minute Literacy Skills session (Monday – Friday), a 30-minute English session (Monday – Friday), a 45-minute Maths session (Monday – Friday) and two Reading Group sessions per week.

Literacy Skills Timetable Changes 2022

Literacy Skills sessions in Prep – Year 3 (Monday – Friday) will be more streamlined. Katy Williams, Louise Upton, Natalie Dare and I will work in conjunction with the class teachers.

  • Prep: 8:30 – 9:00 | Year 1: 9:00 – 9:30 | Year 2: 9:30 – 10:00 | Year 3: 10:00 – 10:30

Early Start Testing 2022

From Katy Williams

I have been conducting this testing for a number of years now and this year I noticed that the students from Prep to Year 2 approached the reading and writing tasks with more confidence and greater skill than in previous years. The areas of letter formation, segmenting and blending when reading and sounding out and recalling letter choices when spelling and writing was much improved. In previous years many students baulked when it came to writing or reading the provided texts, this year every student attempted all tasks without hesitation. It is my opinion that this is a direct result of the explicit teaching of each of these skills in the literacy sessions which I have no doubt will be supported by your data from this year.

I look forward to being part of the team delivering this instruction to our students in 2022.

Partners in Learning Program 2022

The Partners in Learning program supports Schools of Distance Education (SDEs) to enhance the skills of parents and home tutors in improving children's reading. This program is currently under review. More information will be available early next year regarding the presentation format.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of the primary teachers for their remarkable dedication to ensure every student experiences success. They continually reflect on their pedagogical practices to ensure they are providing support provisions for all students. We will continue to work collaboratively to build our capability, I am looking forward to continuing our journey in 2022.

Thank you for a great year! I really appreciate the feedback and support provided by Home Tutors. Wishing everyone a safe and festive Christmas break.

Mrs Rickie Itzstein

Digital Discoveries

Get Geared Up for 2022

The holidays are a great time to ensure you have all the right gear to get the most out of Distance Education.

Hardware

A laptop is great as it allows you to move around and work in different places. The school strongly recommends that each student also have an additional monitor to allow them to have Blackboard Collaborate on one screen and other applications on the other.

Check your student’s headset. Many will need to have a clean and, in some cases, may need repairing. Having a headset allows students to hear and speak clearly during lessons without feedback.

Computer Programs

Student laptops should ideally have Windows 10 as their Operating System (to match what the school is using).

Microsoft Office 365 (or 2016) is the preferred office suite and is available for free to all Education Queensland students to download from Office.com using their school username and password. Office includes: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook.

In order to access the internet, the school highly recommends that students have at least two browsers on their computer. Google Chrome is essential with Internet Explorer or Firefox being used as backup.

Students need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on their computer in order to open PDF files. This is available as a free download from:

https://get.adobe.com/reader/

Review your Internet plan and check with your Internet Service Provider for deals that may apply for students working via Distance Education. It is essential that students have a reliable broadband connection to be able to complete on-air lessons effectively.

Buying a New Computer

If buying a new computer for your student, remember to ensure it meets our minimum specifications to ensure students are able to access all resources and complete all activities required.

C O M P O N E N T

L A P T O P

Processor

Intel Core i5 Quad Core processor or AMD equivalent

Chipset

Intel 8250U or equivalent

Screen

14” LCD / LED Full HD, 1920 x 1080 (pixels)

Memory

8Gb

Hard Disk (HDD)

256GB SSD or 500GB SATA

Optical Drive (optional)

DVD RW (can be external with USB)

Audio

AC’97 compliant

Internal or external speakers

Video

Supports Microsoft Windows 10 and above,

Intel UHD Graphics 620 with shared Graphics Memory or AMD Radeon 530 4GB GDDR5

Wireless

Standard 802.11a/b/g or a/g/n if not standard

Ports

four (4) USB, One (1) HDMI.

Microphone and headphones ports (unless using a USB port)

Warranty

Four (4) Years Next Business Day Onsite or Return-To-Base dependant on location including the battery

Consider ‘Accidental Damage Cover’ if available

Windows

Windows 10

Mouse

Two (2) button optical scroll mouse with wheel

Keyboard

US Keyboard with full size keys

Webcam

Integrated webcam if possible, otherwise an external one with minimum 1080p

Battery

Long lasting battery (minimum 6 hours)

Bluetooth

V4.1

External Hard Drive

Optional, but recommended for backing up important documents. (minimum 500GB)

Need More Help?

Digital Learning Facilitator – Sam Owczarek: sowcz1@eq.edu.au or 07 4656 8915

For advice or help with using programs or tools on the Learning Place (including eLearn, Microsoft Office and Collaborate Ultra).

Multischool Term 4

Minischool Term 4

Celebration Dinner

Swim Muster 2021

Speech & Awards

Thank You for A Great Year

CSDE Staff Dancing through the Decades