Tonight I will be talking to you about the numeracy program and what it looks like within the Learning

Neighbourhoods at PHPS As a staff, we are committed to providing a curriculum and environment that challenges students to inquire into the world around them. Many opportunities for mathematical enquiry, growth, conceptual and skill based experiences are embedded within the inquiry. These give the students an authentic context in which to engage mathematically with the world in order to describe relationships, solve problems appropriately and creatively and to learn to effectively use the language of number, space, measurement, chance and data. At PHPS we have a current whole school focus on the concepts of number. The reason for such an emphasis on these concepts of number is that it lays a solid foundation on which other mathematical concepts can be built up on. Number concepts such as place value and counting are continuously required when working with space, measurement, chance and data and therefore the importance of a deep understanding of number is imperative. For this reason, as you may have already notice throughout the neighbourhood timetables, there are a number of specific workshops that operate independently from the inquiry units. These targeted and sequenced number based workshops are designed to teach children at the point of need from drawing on the data collected through assessment and tracking. The learning agreement sessions enable the students to further explore the skills and knowledge that have been explicitly taught through workshops. As well as completing learning activities that are linked with the workshop focus; the Learning Agreement time enables a teacher to offer additional assistance, student teacher conferences and small group targeted teaching. As the inquiries develop and evolve within the neighbourhoods, so to do the possibilities to integrate other mathematical concepts that link back to the inquiry. For example in the Year 2 Neighbourhood, through inquiry based learning, we are looking at how children experience, perceive and relate to time. This then allows us to explicitly teach concepts such as the measurement of time, looking at fractions in relation to half past and quarter past, collecting data and representing results through graphs.

As a Victorian Public school we are accountable to teach in alignment with the Victorian Essential Learning Standards and assess against the VELS curriculum. The Northern Metropolitan Region monitors our process and progress to ensure that the curriculum expectations are being reached. We strongly recommend the use of Mathletics as a way to consolidate concepts that being explored within the neighbourhood as it is an engaging educational tool and helps to connect a home-school learning relationship. Maths is all around us, all day every day, so enjoy identifying and sharing these experiences with your children. Thank you Ethan and Prep to 2 team.