Belmore South Public School

 
Today we were very honoured to have 5 guests from Singapore visit our school to see what our wonderful students and teachers have been doing in their classrooms.

The ladies and gentleman were from

Ministry of Education:  

Lim Lai Cheng, Chan Lai Peng, Vincent Lim

Infocomm Development Authority:    

YIP Yuen Fong,  Belinda CHNG

Our special guests were escorted to various classrooms around the school by Sam-James, Sharliyah, Yilmaz and Martin.

On their visit our guests saw classes doing: maths activities, blogging, playing games, making Lego worlds, solving lego problems, doing internet searches and writing. Martin and Yilmaz even showed our guests how to make a computer game.

Our guests saw the students working in groups, as individuals and as whole classes. The teachers and students were all interested and highly motivated in what they were doing using a wide variety of technology. They were using interactive whiteboards, computers and the usual pen and paper. It was not so much the technology that was important but the fact that the technology is just a natural part of our students’ and teachers’ daily lives.

In one classroom the children were working in groups and it was observed how noisy they were. When we looked about they were noisy because they were excited about the activities they were doing. Two girls we noticed were arguing but they were arguing passionately about the problem they were solving.  

In our classes it is important that the children feel comfortable to air their opinions appropriately and be heard. We believe for our children to learn most effectively they need to:

DO IT!          TALK IT!      READ IT!        WRITE IT!

We told the Singapore visitors we had given up using textbooks when the Interactive Whiteboards came into our classrooms.  Why do we need textbooks when we have masses of resources at our fingertips from all over the world and we can choose the best and most appropriate for our students needs?

Thank you for visiting we enjoyed sharing our school with you and we would like to learn more about Singapore.

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This is some of Stage 2 doing their Basic Skills Writing. They took it very seriously . . . spending time planning and then writing using the information in the colourful magazine that is pictured just below in the previous post.

To challenge ourselves and give our students authentic learning experiences our Stage 3 teachers have begun pilot research, in conjunction with the NSW Department of Educations Centre for Learning Innovation. This research is designed to document the impact upon students of learning to design and make their own computer games using Game Maker 6.0.