From the Preschool/Elementary School Principal

 

*This week's images include photos of printmaking in Art, a sunrise over the small astroturf pitch, the Grade 1 field trip to Duthie Park, the K-2 STEM club, some recess fun and making teabags from scratch with the Preschool children.

Transfer is our goal

The students at ISA are probably all-too aware of my love of the game of basketball. I have played and coached the sport for many years. Not only do I love it for its speed, dynamism and as an outlet for my competitive nature, it has taught me a critical thing about the nature of teaching and learning: if you can’t transfer knowledge beyond the practice court, you haven’t really developed or learned in a meaningful way. Or, to put it another way, there is no point in doing drills if a player or team can only react to an opponent if they line up and play exactly as rehearsed in practice. Or, to put it yet another way, a truly skilled basketball player isn’t one who only dazzles during specific drills; a truly skilled player is one who can transfer his or her skills to game situations in ways that help their team.

In education, we also value the ability of our students to apply their learning, especially to transfer their understanding of a concept, or skill, to novel situations. Grant Wiggins, an advocate for authentic education, described transfer as the aim of education: “The point of school is not to get good at school, but to effectively parlay what we learned in school in other learning and in life.”

In our class lessons, teachers are aware that transfer doesn’t automatically occur just because content is covered or something is “taught”. A perfect score on a worksheet about a particular topic doesn’t necessarily demonstrate understanding of a concept or its connections to other ideas or how to apply a skill in a novel setting.

Students can only demonstrate their current understanding of a topic (like the ability to classify quadrilaterals as squares, or rectangles, or parallelograms, etc.), if they are given opportunities to apply their learning in different and unfamiliar tasks. Classifying quadrilaterals is best understood, and indeed assessed, if learners have to complete assignments that challenge them to make sense of past learning in unfamiliar tasks or that stretch them by posing counter-examples. 

At ISA, our goal is not to simply ask students to “learn stuff” and then test them to see how much they have remembered of that learning a few weeks later. Our goal is to develop a deep understanding of topics and concepts, which can then be transferred to new situations and unfamiliar contexts. As parents/carers, when your child comes home to share a piece of individual learning, try to challenge him/her by creating new and unfamiliar scenarios/tasks to see if their learning has been transferred. Should such a challenge give them a reason to pause or stop them in their tracks, don’t be fooled into thinking that this is necessarily a sign of failure. On the contrary, it could show that they are thinking and are actively piecing together a deeper understanding of concepts.

Save a Life Scotland visit

A Resuscitation Officer from ARI has offered to volunteer her time to support Save a Life Scotland and provide all ISA students from Kindergarten to Grade 5 with essential information about saving a life. This initiative supports the Scottish Government's Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest Strategy. The Resuscitation Officer who will come to ISA has experience in teaching these skills to children, including young children, through simulated play. This letter was sent out to families

Grade 5 Poetry Stay-and-Share

On Thursday, 23 January 2025, from 8:30am until 9:00am, we would love for the parents/carers of Grade 5 students to come and read poetry with their child and their peers. Feel free to bring your own favourite poem(s) to share - a diverse representation of poetry would be excellent (i.e., various languages, poet origins, messages, styles, etc.). We will also have some poetry books out for you to enjoy. This is an informal event - a time to simply share in the joy of poetry with your child!

End of Quarter 2 - Progress Reports

Today is the final day of Quarter 2 in the Elementary School. Our teachers are putting the finishing touches on the Q2 Progress Reports. These will be available next Friday (January 24) and will be accessible through PowerSchool. The Q2 progress reports are narrative reports, giving you detailed information about your child’s progress across the range of subjects.