In 2006, the Port Lincoln Junior Primary School secured a grant from the Department of Education, Science and Training, enabling us to offer a new program for our indigenous students. This is the Parent School Partnership initiative and is aimed at increasing opportunities for indigenous parents to work with the school as well as improve student learning literacy.
   
Here we are having a lesson from our AET on how to use the digital camera

Students work with an SSO for regular sessions each week, during which time they use digital cameras and computers to make readers featuring different activities in their lives at school. The students take photos of each other at their chosen activity and then download these photos onto the computer.

 

Using Microsoft Publisher they then create a book cover plus individual pages featuring one photo per page to which they add their own text. Font type and size is decided by each child and created with a little help and guidance from the SSO. All of these pages are then laminated and bound together as a book.

Click here to look at some of our books.
  

Our SSO was there to guide us through all of the different activities.

  

This is what our CD looked like after we printed a label on the back.

 

These books are then transformed into a Power Point presentation to which the children add backgrounds on each slide and a title page. These Presentations are then burned to a CD and the students are shown how to make a simple CD label featuring their name and photograph which we print onto the back of the CD.

 
   

From the language of the readers they created, each child chooses 10 words which they then transform into flash cards.

Using a template made by an SSO, the students add their chosen flash card words and a photo of themselves to a board game base. In this game they move around the board via dice throws matching their flash card words to the ones printed on the board base they have already created.

Each child finishes up with a package containing their self made reader, 4 sets of flash cards, a CD with a PowerPoint presentation of their book and a board game with dice and counters which they can share with their families, classmates and local kindergartens.

 

We had to match up our flash card words as we played the game we made.

 
   

 

  
Parents are actively encouraged to become involved ~ they can learn the skills alongside their child. Other activities, such as cooking, craft and gardening, are  also planned later in the program.