Talara Primary College Regional Showcase Award for Excellence in Innovation
Talara Primary College has been recognised in the Education Queensland Showcase Awards for the very unique and extremely successful Italian program within our College. Our school community has worked extremely hard to be able to offer all of our students, the opportunity to be learning a second language right from Prep.
Congratulations to our fantastic Italian Team – Alison Myors, Sonia Balidsseria and Kate DeIuliis - who have received the Regional Showcase Award for Excellence in Innovation, which was announced as part of Education Week.
The team have been recognised for their terrific approach to teaching Italian and their unrelenting focus on striving to continually improve the intellectual rigor and quality language outcomes for students engaged in the program from Prep to Year 7.
In meeting our school’s vision of enabling our students to be part of a globalised society, some of the fantastic opportunities that have been created for the students include:
- having an Italian student teacher from Italy, working with the students for a term each year and staying with different families
- engaging with different dramatic performances of travelling Italian productions
- running Talara Master Chef with a professional Italian Chef
- annual subscriptions to Italian magazines, journals and online resources
- ensuring students are familiar with basics from early age so that they can go more deeply into language in upper primary years
- working in partnership with an Italian publisher to review and develop suitable resources specifically for early years students.
Learning a second language is strongly supported through significant brain research, especially in the early schooling years. Upon graduation, Talara students have been engaged in over 300 hours of second language study, nearly three times more than their peers in other schools. Students participating in Talara's Italian program have won numerous awards and achieved outstanding academic results, with many of these students continuing to study Italian into their senior years at our feeder high schools.