Enhance Learning Educational Services

16/06/2024

It's been an exciting week with the announcement that Systematic Synthetic Phonics and Explicit Direct Instruction will be mandated in Victorian schools from 2025! 🎉😃

This should reduce the number of students who require intervention with private tutors due to ineffective reading instruction (albeit well intentioned- listen to this amazing documentary of you want to know how we ended up in this mess https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/).

09/04/2024

I was recently interviewed with my business partner, Sue Hiland, about our experiences in education and how it led us to where we are now - for me, that's in the full time role as a Leading Teacher of Literacy in a large school.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/ep1CNNismHo9tWyg/?mibextid=ZbWKwL

It was an absolute honour to engage in a wonderful conversation with Sue and Michelle about their Chapter, Teaching Together. In this conversation Sue and Mi...

17/02/2024

I presented today with my business partner at Sharing Best Practice. It was such a thrill to share our knowledge with other teachers and educators.

17/01/2024

Here's two activities from one of my recent sessions.

Sound/picture hunt (hidden around the room), listening to the initial sound, sorting them and then matching with the graphemes (letter representation).

We followed this with a jumbled sentence activity.

I supported the student in piecing the sentence together one word at a time, practicing sounding out words and blending them together. We added one word on at a time and always going back to the start in order to read the words/phrases more fluently each time (sometimes called pyramid reading). This student needs lots of exposures and repetitions. So this activity was perfect as they ended up reading it at least 7 times.

23/11/2023

✅️🧮This is another way that I introduced times tables to a student. Beginning with concrete materials, then counting each colour group and writing it down.

Seeing times tables in more than one way can be a really powerful way to make them meaningful and memorable for students.

After introducing the concept, I move students on to learn the skip counting pattern in chunks of 3 to 5 numbers at a time. Trying to remember all 12 numbers in one go is never going to work. That's what we call cognitive overload. Small chunks lead to greater success. ✨️

"What are the coloured sticks for?" I hear you ask. Well, they mark out the 10's to help students make connections and think more flexibly about numbers. Eg . 3 groups of 4 is 10 and 2 more 👉 3×4=12 🌟

maths

25/10/2023

Check out our mail box! I don't think we'll be getting any mail delivered any time soon.

18/10/2023

Get your free training today here: https://www.nessy.com/free-resources/dyslexia-awareness-month

05/10/2023

If anyone out there is looking for a tutor - Sue has amazing knowledge and skills working with students in the area of literacy. I can highly recommend.

18/09/2023

I actually got a decent photo of me and my kids. It's so good to get out of our usual routine to appreciate the great outdoors.

19/08/2023

Thanks .bowd.au and for a great session with these gorgeous kids. 💛 They loved getting to meet a real life author and hear about how books are created. They especially loved all the shoes and spoon characters. 👢👟 Next week's Preparation for Prep activity is all sorted now - phenomenal sunflowers! 🌻📚

28/07/2023

Pencil grips have certainly improved since I started my career many years ago.

These just arrived in the mail! YAY! I can't wait to help my kindy kids get the feel of a correct pencil grip at today's session.

Getting pencil grip right at this stage is SOOO much easier than trying correct it later down the track.

20/07/2023

📚It's been a little while between purchases of picture story books, but I couldn't resist this one. It's full of questions.💡 Some with clear answers 🔦, some that prompt inferential thinking🔎 and some where there are no limits to the possibilities. ❓️✅️🌏