Teaching and Learning

Welcome to Sandringham East Primary School, where every child is encouraged to learn and grow in a supportive and exciting environment. Our school is dedicated to providing top-quality education that helps students thrive academically and as whole individuals.

At Sandringham East Primary School, we have high expectations for our students and teachers. We tailor our teaching to meet the unique needs of each child, taking into account their interests, abilities, and the Victorian Curriculum. Our goal is to support learning through various methods such as individual attention, group work, and whole-class instruction. We continuously assess our students’ progress to ensure they receive the best possible education.

Creating a safe and nurturing environment is our priority. We encourage our students to think critically, solve problems creatively, and take ownership of their learning journey from Prep to Grade 6.

At Sandringham East Primary School, we have 5 core beliefs about how students learn. These beliefs underpin everything that we do at our school:

1. We believe:  A school community is an inclusive village, built on trust and mutual respect, enabling students, teachers and parents to inspire and encourage each other.
2. We believe: Our students and teachers deserve rich and intentional learning experiences that meet their individual needs, providing the right balance of support and challenge. 
3. We believe:  when learners are encouraged to be active in and central to the learning process, they feel empowered to co-construct meaning, resulting in higher levels of motivation, engagement and wellbeing.
4. We believe: to enable creative and critical thinkers, who are equipped to inquire, problem solve and act, we must explicitly provide them with the skills, knowledge and attitudes. 
5. We believe: Collaborative learning fosters interaction, cooperation and feedback among learners which enhances the learning experience, improves learning outcomes, and creates a sense of connectedness and community. 

ENGLISH

At Sandringham East Primary School, we embrace a balanced approach to literacy instruction that combines a structured synthetic phonics framework with our workshop model. Our aim is to cultivate strong foundational skills alongside creativity and critical thinking.

Structured synthetic phonics underpin our literacy instruction in the early years and builds a strong foundation in reading and writing from the outset. Targeted explicit instruction and a multi-sensory structured approach is used to deliver a sequence of phonemes and phonological skills, enabling students to decode words accurately and independently. Decodable texts are used to support beginning readers as they develop their phonemic awareness and blending and segmenting skills, providing them with an opportunity to practice what has been taught during lessons.

Complementing our phonics instruction, we implement the workshop model to foster a love for reading and writing while nurturing individualized learning experiences. Students are exposed to a wide range of reading and writing experiences, using mentor texts to practice increasingly sophisticated comprehension skills. They explore various genres and select books that are developmentally appropriate, learning what books they love through a rich literacy diet. The workshop model empowers students to have agency in their writing, writing about topics they choose for audiences that are relevant to them. They are explicitly taught language conventions and the structural features found in various writing genres and develop these through the drafting, revising and editing stages. Teachers work alongside students to set goals in both reading and writing, using whole class, small group and one-on-one instruction to explicitly teach skills.  Additional support is provided to students who require a one-to-one program that addresses individual learning needs specific to students who present with reading difficulties.

Our literacy program not only supports diverse learning needs but also encourages students to see reading and writing as interconnected processes that empower them to express themselves effectively. Our seamless integration of explicit structured synthetic phonics with the workshop model ensures that our learners develop fluency in decoding and comprehension while cultivating creativity and critical thinking skills. This balanced approach equips our students with the essential tools to become confident and proficient communicators in both academic and real-world contexts.

NUMERACY

Sandringham East Primary School believes that teaching maths through the Big Ideas provides a curriculum that allows our students to see mathematics as a meaningful subject of connected ideas. This approach has been shown by research to engage students and increase achievement and is the best approach for teaching diverse groups of students. We aim to create pedagogical rich classrooms that promote and develop young mathematicians, and believes that teaching mathematicians involves:

• A developmental approach to learning and teaching that is a dynamic blend of explicit instruction and problem-solving inquiry to apply learned concepts to real world situations
• Modelling new mathematical concepts through a CRA (concrete, representational, and abstract) approach 
• Building our students’ visual understanding of mathematical concepts
• Students using hands-on materials
• High focus on consistent mathematical language that is developmentally appropriate
• Developing our students’ ability to be flexible with numbers to create mathematicians who can manipulate numbers to support efficient strategies to solve problems
• Providing multiple exposures to mathematical concepts that ensure learned mathematics is deeply embedded
• Learning and Teaching that builds on the needs and knowledge of the individual student – differentiation
• Use of games where appropriate
• Incorporates use of ICT to help foster deeper mathematical thinking
• Formative assessment approaches to check for understanding to avoid misconceptions and enable teachers to provide intentional instruction at student’s point of need

Join us at Sandringham East Primary School, where we celebrate each child’s individuality and foster a love for learning that lasts a lifetime.