ACT Meeting #3 - Year Seven Transition

Next Wednesday, the 6th August, is the third of the Australian Curriculum Talks, which will be held in the Kalgoorlie Primary School library from 3.30-4.30pm.

Whilst the content and discussions will be relevant to all teacher and administrators, we have a special Year Seven Transition flavour to this event. 

• Mr David Bryant, HOLA English at KBCHS, will share a 15-20 min presentation that will briefly cover these topics:

         - context of KBCHS

         - where KBCHS is at and where we're going with AC and Y7 planning/implementation

         - why a whole school approach to teaching literacy was developed and steps taken to implement it

        - share the strategy
        - quick Q&A 

•  Informal discussion around the literacy demands of students in upper primary school and early high school. 
• General sharing of tasks and activities which support the teaching of literacy skills across the curriculum. 

Please register via the PLI or contact Mel for further information. 

Updated ACARA work sample portfolios

Updated and improved annotated student work sample portfolios have been posted on the Australian Curriculum website!

Each portfolio is an example of evidence of student learning in relation to the achievement standard. The portfolios indicate quality that is satisfactory, above satisfactory and below satisfactory. The annotations are key when viewing the portfolio as they describe the quality of what is demonstrated.

The portfolios are available on the Australian Curriculum website on each of the learning area pages for English, Maths, Science and History.

http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/english/Curriculum/F-10

http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/mathematics/Curriculum/F-10

http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/science/Curriculum/F-10

http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/humanitiesandsocialsciences/history/Curriculum/F-10

Australian Curriculum Talks (ACT)

This term we hosted two ACT Meetings, providing teachers in the Kalgoorlie area with the opportunity to learn about, discuss and share experiences related to the implementation of the Australian Curriculum.

The first ACT Meeting was held on the fourteenth of May and was very well attended by 45 teachers, Heads of Learning Areas, curriculum leaders, deputies and principals. The focus of the first meeting was "Putting the puzzle together" and determining direction for future meetings. Participants revised some key messages about the Australian Curriculum and discussed how the elements of the curriculum work together. Teachers shared strategies for effectively using the year level statements, content descriptions, elaborations, achievement standards and work sample portfolios to plan, teach and assess using the West Australian Curriculum English.

The second ACT Meeting was held on the 25th of June with an emphasis on punctuation. Twenty participants discussed the expectations of the Australian Curriculum in regards to the explicit teaching of punctuation and grammar, shared resources to support teachers and discussed best practice teaching strategies.

Next term, in week three, our ACT Meeting has a whole school and Year seven transition flavour; the high school and some local primary schools are going to share their whole school Literacy plans and teachers will participate in some fun activities to develop shared understanding of the curriculum.  

'On the Way Home' Year 3 Learning Sequence.

This month we have special guest blogger Helen Smith, Curriculum Leader and year three teacher at Kalgoorlie Primary School, sharing her 'On the Way Home' learning sequence for year three.

Year three have been working very hard on writing narratives this term. It’s quite a skill to plan a story with rounded characters, a convincing setting, create a conflict and then resolve it! We have read lots of short stories and dissected their structure in order for our students to understand how narratives work.

We used ‘On the Way Home’ by Jill Murphy as one of our texts to help our students plan and write their own narratives. The premise of this book is very simple: a girl, Clare, has hurt her knee and on her way home several of her friends stop her to ask how she did it. The genius is that Clare tells a different tall tale to each of her friends to explain the bad knee, and the story is populated by traditional fairy tale characters, aliens, gorillas and crocodiles as the stories become more and more fanciful. The language is sparse, but full of alliterative adjectives and well-chosen verbs so there are many opportunities for covering those language objectives in the AC.

The stories told by Clare make an excellent skeleton for the students to flesh out with their own ideas and the subject matter is familiar enough for them to draw on their own experiences. We had fun writing our ‘On the Way Home’ stories, and they made great scripts for the students to make some excellent movies on the iPads using ‘PuppetPals’. Check out the planning for this unit of work along with the success criteria which we used to mark the writing.

On the Way Home Learning Sequence

Success Indicators Rubric

On the Way Home - Adjectives activity

Global Education

Welcome back to school! I hope you all had the opportunity to participate in (and present) some inspiring professional learning to motivate you for the year. At Kalgoorlie Primary School we were very lucky to have Cameron from the One World Centre present a thought-provoking, half day session on global education. The morning was a fantastic mix of information about global issues, opportunities to discuss ideas in groups, engaging activities relevant for use in the classroom and commentary on links to the Australian Curriculum. 

Students in the twenty-first century are interconnected like never before and common sense...as well as the Australian Curriculum, tells us that we need to empower our students by providing them with meaningful opportunities to;

• learn about themselves and others 
• learn about diversity and 
• ultimately, recognise a shared humanity and communal responsibility for our world..

Enabling young people to participate in a better shared future is at the heart of global education. 

The cross curricular priorities, the general capabilities, English, History and Geography all explicitly emphasise the importance of teaching students to become reflective, responsible global citizens.  

Stay tuned for lesson plans and units of work, developed and trialled at KPS, with a Global Education flavour.

 

Entitlement...and the Australian Curriculum

During the summer holidays, I spent some time catching up on a year’s worth of reading.  I hope you also found some time to refresh and recharge doing the things you love.

One of the professional readings I completed during the break, “Data-Driven Instructional Leadership” written by Rebecca J. Blink Ph.D, reminded me of an integral aspect of the Australian Curriculum - the concept of entitlement. This is the right of every Australian child; regardless of geographical location, socioeconomic status, race or religion, to have the opportunity to be exposed to and learn set knowledge, skills and understandings.

The book began with a personal recount which emphasised the role of the ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB) policy in the US in providing greater opportunities for the author’s nephew, who had an identified intellectual disability. Prior to the directive that every child be exposed to an academic curriculum, this student had spent hours completing menial tasks; wiping down benches, distributing newletters, photocopying …in the name of life-skills. As a result of the policy, he was given access to the academic curriculum, the opportunity to learn to read and write and to develop the skills to actively operate in society – true life skills.

An extreme example in some ways, and our Australian Curriculum is very different to NCLB; however, the shared concept of entitlement is something we, as educators and school leaders, need to keep at the forefront of our minds as we progress down the path of national curriculum implementation. So that children from across our diverse nation are provided with equity of access to learning. 

Kalgoorlie Primary School is hosting a Centra professional learning opportunity, investigating the concept of entitlement and other core messages of the Australian Curriculum during term two. Please contact us if you would like more information and keep an eye on the blog for updated information.