Differentiation for St Michael’s Thirroul 

SPLICED: Stretching Potentiontial through Learning in Interactive Challenging Environments in the Diocese. 

SPLICED is a CEO initiative that aims to provide conceptually based differentiated units for learners that are teacher identified as intellectually motivated and in need of an extra challenge. At the end of the SPLICED 2020 journey, a few of our students may be lucky enough to be identified as intellectually gifted and be published on the SPLICED CEO website or in the SPLICED published book. 

The unit for the 2020 SPLICED program is “Contemplating Connections”. During this unit, we give selected students the opportunity to engage in critical, creative and reflective thinking. The students involved with the SPLICED unit this year have had their first workshop where they began their brainstorming ideas for their topic. 

The students selected for SPLICED will be working on their unit once a week during an in-school workshop with Miss Treble and Mrs Mayo. They will also be given in-class time as negotiated with their classroom teacher of up to two hours a week, some of our students will also be attending out of school workshops with John Charadia from the Catholic Education Office. St Michael’s is also lucky enough to have booked in some in-school workshops with Mr John Charadia so he can support students on their journey throughout the program. 

St Michael’s Coding Club

This year students have the opportunity to participate in the St Michael’s Coding Club. Throughout Terms 1 and 2, Stage 3 students can participate in the club during lunch times to develop their coding skills using mBots. 

mBot is a STEM education robot, that makes teaching and learning robot programming simple and fun. As students progress, they will learn about a variety of robotic machinery and electronic parts, develop an understanding of the fundamentals of block-based programming, and expand on their logical thinking and design skills.

Students will complete tutorials in which the basics of block coding is taught to them and then have an opportunity to participate in a school based competition, which may then lead to Regional and Diocesan Challenge days.

We have already had a successful start to the year with many Year 6 students participating at lunch time on a Monday and a large number of Year 5 students participating on Wednesdays.