The COVID-19 pandemic has affected us all. Many members of our school community have been exposed to trauma, and will need care and support during the transition to whatever the new ‘normal’ is. We need to make sure we don’t overload our students (and ourselves) as we return to what has been familiar. In this…
‘The theme for Reconciliation Week this year — More Than A Word: Reconciliation Takes Action — encourages the broader community to consider the steps they can take to promote healing and unity with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’ Truth-telling and how cultural repatriation is fundamental to the reconciliation process by Jai McAlister We know…
The Mathematical Association of NSW’s (@MathsNSW) annual Pre K-8 conference was held last Friday and Saturday. What a wonderful opportunity it was to meet up with other teachers and educators to chat and learn about mathematics. Last year the conference was unable to go ahead so it’s been a while since could meet together face-to-face…
We’ve missed it by a day, but there is always room for poetry. We can honour poetry this week in our classrooms with a bit of history, lots of readings, and even more writing. It’s in the English syllabus so we have to. As I am preparing this, it is STILL raining, and I am…
The school year has started with excitement and anticipation, moving out of the shadows and impacts of last year.
Things have been a bit awry this year, with major disruptions to almost every one of our usual activities, and events have been cancelled and postponed, many to the hoped-for normality of 2021. I wonder what the key words and terms from this year will be the ones that represent and encapsulate 2020. NAIDOC Week…
It’s back to school for Term 4 in NSW and for the first time probably all year, students may have some interesting holiday activities to share. Whether they stayed at home, played with cousins, went camping, visited the zoo, grandma’s, or a friend’s house, first day back often involves writing a recount. Well I thought…
In the next few weeks we have some major, national and religious events that we can acknowledge in our schools. They provide the opportunity to examine the Australian Curriculum’s general capability of Intercultural Understanding and examining some of the stated and unstated values in our everyday context.
Last week NESA (NSW Education Standards Authority) released the interim report on the curriculum review Nurturing wonder and igniting passion: Designs for a future school curriculum. This 131 page document presents a summary if initial feedback and early recommendations regarding the future of education in NSW. “The Interim Report is informed by a first phase…
This blog is the second of two reflections on the annual MANSW (Mathematical Association of NSW) conference “Mathematics: The greatest Show”, you can access the first blog here. Following on from the first blog, this reflection focuses on the keynote and a couple of workshops from Day 2 of the conference. Choosing and using problems…