At UPS, many of our students enjoy the opportunity to be involved in an English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EALD) program with a focus on learning the features of Standard Australian English.

The following snapshot is from our EALD teachers, Mrs Van Leuven and Ms Jenkins, highlighting what has been happening in the EALD room recently.

This term, the Junior Primary EALD students will be treated to some very exciting guests… animals from the Nature Education Centre are being borrowed fortnightly over the course of the term. The EALD room currently has 2 green tree frogs, and children will meet stick insects, dunnarts, zebra finches and geckoes. The animals will provide the students with opportunities to write lots of descriptions and informative texts.

At the end of Term 2, the Year 6/7 students from rooms 3 and 4 wrote some simile poems. We had been looking at the use of figurative language in narratives and poetry, and the students were able to create some fabulous imagery. Their poems were based on a person, a pet or an aspect of nature that they were very familiar with. As you can read here, Yuxi, Yuxin, Chloe, Lillian and Wren wrote poems that certainly created some powerful images.