Being responsive to students’ intellectual needs involves tailoring the learning environment and practices appropriately to create suitable, impactful learning experiences for all learners.
It includes adapting the curriculum to meet the unique needs of learners by making modifications in complexity, depth, and pacing. This is achieved using Extension and Enrichment programs and activities which exist across the grades, encouraging student achievement and support student wellbeing.
“Do not measure yourself with what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability”.
– John Wooden.
Learning Support Programs
Every child at Emmaus Catholic Primary School is entitled to receive the best education by being given opportunities to flourish. The Learning Support Team assists those students who require additional support in meeting their full potential in order to gain the confidence and skills to experience success in the classroom.
To support students with additional learning needs, Emmaus Catholic Primary School has Individual Education Plans (IEPs) that enable individual goals to be targeted and monitored through the collaborative work of the classroom teacher and Learning Support Team. Specialised teachers and educational assistants provide in-class and withdrawal support for students with additional needs across the school.
Academic Extension and Enrichment
Extension: Differentiated class activity that takes into account the higher order thinking skills of analysing, evaluating, creating and problem solving. These questions and activities will often activate divergent thinking, development of different perspectives and seeking of alternative solutions. Higher order thinking skills of analysing, evaluating, creating and problem solving.
Enrichment: Learning beyond the usual curriculum, including withdrawal programs which deepen the students’ knowledge, understandings, and skills. The Emmaus Extension, Challenge and Elevated Learning Program is offered to students who demonstrate the need for a more challenging curriculum. The ExCEL Program is a withdrawal enrichment program that provides educational experiences which appropriate in depth and breadth for students who have been identified as having exceptional academic ability. The program involves the deepening of students’ knowledge, understanding and skills beyond the curriculum.
Academic enrichment and extension programs are an integral component of student-centred learning. In particular, they allow teachers to nurture and strengthen the natural abilities and gifts of students, which according to Gagne’s Model of Giftedness and Talent (2008) can be systemically developed according to competencies. Emmaus Catholic Primary School adopts this approach and implements extension and enrichment programs as a quintessential component of a flexible, dynamic, and responsive learning environment, which offers gateways for students to engage in rigorous, personalised and stimulating pathways.
Supporting Student Learning – Journeying Together
Every child’s learning journey begins at home. At Emmaus Catholic Primary School the school and parent community journey together to ensure each child is able to achieve their potential. Every child is honoured as an individual and Emmaus Catholic Primary School seeks to build upon their creativity and aspirations. In the Spirit of Montessori, Emmaus Catholic Primary school educators strive to make learning its own reward with each success fuelling the desire to discover even more. In this endeavour, it is vital that in supporting student learning, there is regular, consistent communication between home and school.
Emmaus Catholic Primary School staff are committed and dedicated professionals seeking to do their best for all students supported by a proactive leadership team with a passion for learning and caring for all community members, especially students.
‘I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
– Galileo Galilei
