Our school values learning as a lifelong skill and this is something we aim to instil in our students. We value learning as a staff and are committed to professional and self-development to improve teaching practices and outcomes for our students. As part of our inquiry cycle into reading rotations, 6 of our staff members represented our school at a professional learning on Tuesday 3^rd November focused on The Big Six skills of reading.

This professional learning explored guiding questions of:

What are 'The Big Six'?

Why do they matter?

How do I teach them?

Each area of The Big 6 (Phonics, Phonological Awareness, Comprehension, Oral Language, Vocabulary and Fluency) were examined, and strategies for teaching were discussed. The professional learning was incredibly valuable for our staff who attended and the next step is for our staff to reflect on and share back key learnings with our school community to further inform our inquiry.

Sophie Sheehan

Literacy Coach

What are the Big Ideas in Number?

At Lindisfarne Primary School we are committed to every learner demonstrating at least a year of growth for a year of learning in both Reading and Number.  Our teaching and learning of the Number and Algebra Strand within the Australia Curriculum focuses on the Big 6: Trusting the Count, Place Value, Multiplicative Thinking, Partitioning, Proportional Reasoning and Generalising.  Over the next few newsletters, I will explain some of these Big Ideas and provide some ideas for you to support these at home.

Professor Di Siemon. Nailing the Big Ideas in Number: National Partnership Schools Forum

Trusting the Count

Trusting the Count focuses on the fundamental building blocks which children need to be able to develop number sense.  It includes being able to count aloud using the correct sequence (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc), recognise numerals, recognising dice patterns, count collections by counting in ones and then later 2’s, 5’s and 10’s and also matching the correct numeral to a collection.  Subitising (recognising how many are in a collection without having to count it) is also a key component of Trusting the Count as well as developing mental images of collections (seeing that 6 can be represented in different ways on a tens frame and having a photo of this stored to recall when needed – please see below).

I know what 6 looks like on a ten frame…

When students begin to see that amounts can be partitioned (broken up) into multiple parts they can then start using this understanding to help them solve more complex problems. 

How can you help at home?

Asking your children to subitise (say how many without counting) regularly is important.  This can be done at tea time (How many carrot pieces are on your plate?), in the car (How many cars are parked on the side of the road?), at the park (How many children can you see playing at the swings?) or even just before they go to sleep (How many windows can you see?).  If the collection is larger than 5 or 6 encourage them to see the collections as groups rather than counting all (e.g. I can see 5 pillows on the couch and another 2 on the chairs so that’s 7).  This can also be done while reading stories but looking at the pictures and talking about how many we can see.  If you child is not yet ready to subitise counting the items on a page, pointing to each individual item once, and being able to say how many at the end is also a great way to engage in number discussions at home!

Here are some pictures of our Kinders, Preps & Prep/1s exploring Trusting the Count.  They are using things like dominoes and number lines to help them explore numbers and collections!