The West Northam Primary School vision for our students is
Belong, Respect, Learn!
Our motto at West Northam Primary School is Belong – Respect – Learn, where students learn to persevere and achieve their best. We foster a sense of belonging and support our students to respect, care and contribute to a positive school community.
At West Northam Primary School, we offer your child a high-quality education in a safe, caring and culturally inclusive environment where all students can learn and grow.
Our highly skilled early childhood and senior team leaders work closely with staff to ensure our teachers use effective practices that provide excellence in teaching and learning for our students.
To prepare our students for an increasingly technological world, every classroom has an interactive LED panel and we provide every student with an iPad or laptop to ensure the students receive the highest level of instruction using the latest in technology.
Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) is about prevention, rather than intervention and explicitly teaching the students the skills to make good behaviour choices. Our staff are committed to teaching our students with kindness and compassion, applying PBS to establish our values of belong, respect and learn, and explicitly teaching the behaviour expectations linked to each value. PBS focuses on moving from ‘Managing Student Behaviour’ to ‘Student Engagement’ by building a sense of belonging, promoting a school culture in which students respect themselves and others, creating an inclusive environment where students can focus on their learning.
Our school has strong partnerships with the community and regularly extends invitations to parents, friends and family members to visit the school for special events and to celebrate successes. Our P&C and the School Council work diligently to support the school and we welcome parents, carers, family and friends into our school and into our classrooms to build our partnership with you in your child’s education.
OUR TEACHING AND LEARNING
Teaching for Impact
The Department of Education’s Teaching for Impact ‘outlines what effective teachers believe, what they know and what they do to have high impact on student outcomes’.
At West Northam Primary School, we have developed a framework for teaching which includes all the elements of what effective teachers do, as outlined in the Teaching for Impact overview.
West Northam Primary School Essential Components of Effective Lessons:
Learning Intention: The teacher explains what the students are learning today (WALT).
Success Criteria: The teacher explains the relevance of the learning intention and how students will show they have achieved it; what I’m looking for (WILF).
The teacher Activates Prior Knowledge and Reviews Previous Learning.
Explicit Instruction: The teacher explicitly teaches the concepts, ideas, skills and strategies for learning.
Worked Examples: The teacher shows the students the steps required to understand the new content and skills and complete the learning task.
Check For Understanding: The teacher asks questions to check the students understand the concept and the task.
Guided Practice: The students practise the task together with the teacher.
Scaffolding/Differentiation: Frameworks and adjustments are provided to cater for individual student needs.
Check For Understanding: The teachers give explicit feedback and ask questions to check the students understand the concept and the task.
Independent Practice: The students complete the task independently.
Scaffolding/Differentiation: Frameworks and adjustments are provided to cater for individual student needs.
Check For Understanding: The teacher gives explicit feedback and asks questions to check the students understand the concept and the task.
Closure: The teacher summarises/reviews the concept and ask questions to check the students understand the concept and the task.
Digital Technologies
West Northam Primary School has a commitment to providing the very best in Digital Technologies instruction across all year levels from Kindy to Year 6. Every classroom has an LED Interactive Panel, banks of iPads or laptops, plus various devices and robots, which provide the students at West Northam with the tools to incorporate Digital Technologies into their daily learning.
Our junior classes have class sets of iPads, which are used across all subjects to teach Digital Technologies; and in our senior classes, each student is allocated a laptop, which is their own personal learning tool. This allows the teachers to fully integrate Digital Technologies into the students’ daily learning, ensuring that the students at West Northam are equipped for today’s technology-focused world.
The teachers at West Northam integrate ICT across all learning areas to transform student learning, ensuring that our students have the knowledge and skills needed for the future.
PLD Reading and Spelling
Learning to read and write is like learning a code. The letters we use are written code for the speech sounds of English. Learning about the relationship between the letters of the alphabet and the speech sounds they represent allows us to “crack the code” and learn to both read and write.
Synthetic Phonics is a way of teaching children to read. Research has identified that Synthetic Phonics, as described in The Science of Reading, is the most successful way to teach reading and spelling. The ‘synthetic’ part of Synthetic Phonics refers to ‘synthesising’, or ‘blending together’. The ‘phonics’ part refers to the process of linking the individual sounds in spoken words to written symbols or letters.
PLD’s Structured Synthetic Phonics program is a whole-school program that is aligned with current research, where children learn to link the letters in a written word to speech sounds and then blend these sounds together to read words. They also learn to separate spoken words into individual sounds and link these sounds to letters to spell the words.
The Seven Steps of Writing
The Seven Steps of Writing are described as ‘the building blocks to great writing’. The steps break down writing into manageable chunks, so students aren’t overwhelmed by writing a whole piece of work straight away. Instead, they gain confidence with each step they learn, to become creative and engaging writers. Over time, they will learn how to put all the steps together to write complete texts independently.
The Seven Steps of writing are:
Step 1: Plan for Success: Generating and discussing ideas. ‘If you can’t talk it, you can’t write it.’
Step 2: Sizzling Starts: The importance of engaging the reader immediately.
Step 3: Tightening Tension: Building the tension/excitement with escalation.
Step 4: Dynamic Dialogue: Using dialogue to develop believable characters.
Step 5: Show, Don’t Tell: Using detail to paint vivid word pictures for the reader.
Step 6: Ban the Boring: Remove any unnecessary details that do not add to the story.
Step 7: Exciting Endings/Ending with Impact: Using different techniques to give endings power and impact with an action climax and an emotional resolution.
The teachers at West Northam Primary School have completed Professional Learning in the Seven Steps, and as a whole school, we are working together to implement the Seven Steps of writing into our classes to provide our students with the building blocks to become great writers!
Top Ten Maths
West Northam Primary School uses the Top Ten Maths program to help deliver the Mathematics Curriculum in a sequential, hands-on way.
Each class is equipped with a maths toolbox to provide access to resources and concrete materials, helping children to make connections between mathematical concepts and everyday life.
The program is supported by a mathematical library of 75 specially chosen picture story books. These books are used as a hook to introduce and engage students in maths.
Teaching and learning using concrete materials, allows students to better understand and gain a passion for problem solving through mathematics.
Our Top Ten Maths lessons consist of:
Mastery through repetition and practice.
A review of previously learnt concepts and skills.
Effective hooks to engage students and link to real-life applications of the concept.
Explicit teaching and modelling of the learning intention.
Participating in hands-on activities using concrete materials.
Opportunities to work collaboratively with partners.
Success and high expectations for all students by differentiating.
Students sharing, articulating, and discussing what they have learnt.