World Travellers

The Successful Language Learners project has provided resources for Old Guildford Public School to evolve as a centre for community activity.  The school has been able to develop a range of initiatives to support parental engagement in the school. These have included formal education programs to informal social activities. Programs offered have been varied and in response to parent needs and requests. Government and non-government agencies, and community volunteers were accessed to set up these programs. Child minding services were also provided through project funding.

The photos below showcase a sample of our  community programs including: Parent excursions, Values program, Nutrition program, webcam tutors (Citibank) and TAFE English classes.

I’ll be sharing all the wonderful work being undertaken by  the    students, staff and parents at Old Guildford Primary school, as part of the Successful Language Learners Project (SLL). The SLL project is a 2 year project (currently in its second year) which aims to implement a number of literacy and numeracy programs to enrich the language  skills of ESL learners. Through the project, we have also organised and developed a variety of community programs to support our parents and establish the school as a centre of community activity.

Blogging is quickly catching on at Old Guildford PS.  1 frog is the latest class that have set up a new  blog to share their class work with you. You can find the class link on the blog roll.

I’ m currently working at old Guildford Primary School. Kindergarten Rainbow Fish have just started their first blog. Click on their link (see blog roll)  to check out their work.

Here are some more pictures of S1H incorporating visible thinking routines into their learning.

This week the Jollybops show came to our school to teach us about science with an aboriginal perspective. The Professor and “Rusty” did some cool science experiments relating to water, fire, air, gases and sound. Some of us were selected from the audience to participate in the experiments. We even got to play the didgeridoo. 

We have just read the book “Who Sank the Boat” by Pamela Allen.  At the end of the story the  boat sinks.  We  had  a discussion about which animal made the boat sink. Some thought it was the mouse, who was the lightest of all. What do you think? 

We then decided to do some science experiments to find out what things in the  classroom float and what sink.  First we had to make prediction and then test these out.  Take a look at our photos as we  test our predictions.

The ESL world travellers are ready to take off again and report back to you.  Share with us all the fun and interesting things we will be exploring in 2008.  The ESL world travellers will be sending their news straight from the mainstream classrooms this year.  The ESL students are from  KW , S1R, S1M, S1H, S1s (stage 1), and S2J (stg 2). Stay tuned. 

The stage 1 ESL group has been using the new bee-bot program and game mats to consolidate the work they have been doing on shapes,the alphabet, colours and positional language. In the attached photo you can see them using the bee-bot (electronic beetle) to move across the game mats. Each student needed to program a series of directions into the beetle in order for it to move into a location on the game mat. The students had a great time but realised how important it was to give clear instructions. The beetle went around in circles quite a few times but through a trial and error process they were able to work out the right directions. They had lots of fun with the different game mats

This week kindergarten visited the zoo to see the animals they have been learning about. They saw Australian animals, reptiles, African animals, birds, sea creatures and best of all, the new elephant enclosure. Take a look at their close encounters with the animals at Taronga Zoo (the best zoo in the world with a million dollar view of Sydney Harbour.)
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