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.