For several years now, more and more children have been coming to our school with insufficient prior skills in the subjects of Polish language and mathematics and basic and everyday skills that need to be expanded. The differences between the children when they enter the school are considerable, and the processes of mastering the written language and further developing their math skills are becoming increasingly difficult for the children.
We have concluded that we need time, peace and leisure at the entry stage to pick up our students where they are and be able to support them depending on their developmental level. The focus is on the individual child with their strengths and weaknesses, and support and demands should be based on this.
Objectives for the first week of school
In the first weeks of school – until around the October vacation – we primarily pursue the following goals in our first lessons:
Strengthen or train social interaction
Develop and strengthen the class community
Get to know and ritualize everyday school life
Learn and practice school rules
Provide preliminary skills in math and Polish language
Reinforce and train basic skills to cope with everyday school and everyday life
Implications for learning
Therefore, in these first few weeks, we primarily reinforce the subjects of Polish and math in order to diagnose basic skills and prior skills and, based on this, to develop support (up and down) for the individual child. All specialist teachers, tutors and special education teachers are subject to these objectives and develop their lessons in close consultation with the classroom and year team.
Therefore, in the first few weeks of school, we do not necessarily work with the classroom textbooks.