The Australian Curriculum is taught in our school.
We use the curriculum to:
- plan student learning
- monitor and assess student progress
- report student progress to parents
- support student wellbeing.
The curriculum learning areas are:
- humanities and social sciences – history, geography, economics and business, civics and citizenship
- the arts – dance, drama, music, media arts, visual arts
- technologies – design and technologies, digital technologies
- health and physical education
Visit curriculum in South Australia for more information.
Keeping Safe: Child Protection Curriculum
The Keeping Safe: Child Protection Curriculum (KS:CPC) is required for all children and young people in our school. It’s taught each year by teachers who have completed a full-day KS:CPC training course.
It teaches children to:
- recognise abuse and tell a trusted adult about it
- understand what touching is appropriate and inappropriate
- understand ways of keeping themselves safe.
Visit Keeping Safe: Child Protection Curriculum information for parents and carers for more information.
Play is the Way
We are committed to working with families to develop pro-social behaviour in all our students and developing their emotional intelligence.
We believe children need resilience, perseverance and other life skills if they are to remain optimistic in the face of life’s daily challenges. Too many children come to school with the belief that “I come to school to be better than others”.
If a predominance of children is in the pursuit of being better than others, it’s hard to believe that the classroom could be anything other than tense, hostile and tiring. It is important that we counteract this belief by working to convince children of its dangers and encourage them to see school as a place where they “come to better themselves by being able to work with others”. The focus always must be on pursuing their “personal best”.
As adults, our happiness in life revolves around our relationships, so we instil in children that “the more others I can work with the better person I will become.” If we can create safe classrooms where children are considerate of themselves and others, then they will have every opportunity to reach their potentials. We use The Game Factory (Play Is The Way) program to educate our students to become strong and successful adults.
Play is the way games assist teachers to guide children beyond the simple pleasures of playing games to the character building benefits that can be achieved.
Play is the Way games:
- help children to develop and habituate patterns of behaviour that are personally advantageous and culturally appropriate.
- teach children to respond appropriately to the thrill of success and the disappointment of failure. To enjoy competition with good grace and consideration for the other side.
- assist children to control impulsive behaviour and control the need for immediate gratification as they strive for long term rewards and goals.
- encourage children to use their skills to advantage others in the pursuit of common objectives. They strengthen the skills of teamwork and cooperation and help children to manage relationships.
- create a common awareness and language with which to discuss the processes of human action and interaction. They encourage empathy, respect and an appreciation of difference.
- engage children’s emotions and call for mastery and control of those emotions to achieve success. By being challenging, the games develop self motivation and perseverance. They help children to identify the reasons for failure and foster optimism and resilience.
- act as metaphors and analogies for life and by playing these games children hone the skills that help them to live, learn, work and play well.
- improve the social, emotional, physical and mental health of children.
- By playing the games children initiate a process of self awareness and discovery. They create a shared body of experience that is used to build up relationships within the group and to develop the group.
- Because they require effort and application, The Games Factory games help children to understand the value of process in the pursuit of success.
Strong Foundations in Reading and Literacy
Literacy is an important part of succeeding in life. The ability to read and understand what you are reading is at the centre of this development.
Research shows that adults who read well have a wider access to the many and varied job opportunities which are constantly changing in our 21st century world. In today’s society, a child may end up having five or more different careers or jobs in their lifetime! In fact we really do not know what the job opportunities will be over the next decade and beyond. Literacy learning gives our children the knowledge and skills needed to do well in other curriculum areas which they will need throughout life beyond school.
At Salisbury Downs Primary School our students do not work their way through levelled books. This way of teaching children to read relies on memorising words and does not teach the alphabetic code. All of our student will begin their reading journey using decodable (predictable) books. Decodable books are designed to align with our explicit, systematic phonics instruction. They are simple stories constructed using almost exclusively words that are phonetically decodable, using letters and letter-groups that children have learned in phonics lessons. As our students learn more of the alphabetic code, these books become more and more complex, but still support where they are up to in their own learning journey. Students will read more complex books and stories, when they are ready, during shared book with their teacher or small reading group time, and importantly, at home with you.
Comprehension – Going from ‘Learning to read’ to ‘Reading to learn’
Comprehension is the understanding of any text being read, viewed or listened to. This includes finding information in tables and graphs, understanding a commercial on television or a street sign as a few examples. We believe in putting the right book in the hands of the right child at the right time and know that pushing students onto harder books just because they can read or decode the words does not mean they can read fluently or deeply understand what they have read. Reading the right book is the key to being able to access information and make sense of the world around us. The comprehension taught in schools includes activating prior knowledge that is gained in our daily life, inferring meaning from a clue, analysing the information presented to us, knowing how and where to locate information and being able to communicate what has been learnt.
The major determining factor in comprehension success is a student’s basic reading skills. When any of the foundational skills and processes are compromised, so too will be reading comprehension.
Many complicated processes must function harmoniously for comprehension to occur. Students must be able to:
- Say what is on the page using accurate and fluent word-level processing (decoding)
- Assign meaning to each word (vocabulary, morphology and etymology)
- Assemble words into sentences and follow punctuation
- Retain this information while attending to subsequent sentences, continuously updating their understanding of the text
- Use their knowledge of language and the world to supply further context.
At Salisbury Downs, staff have been highly trained in all aspects of comprehension and explicitly teach these skills using the gradual release of responsibility model. (I do, We do, You do) This means students are supported in their learning as teachers gradually give more independent control to students as they show evidence of learning.
Good readers utilise a set of highly complex and well developed skills before, during and after reading so they can understand, learn from the text and remember what they have read.
Salisbury Downs offers quality teaching of all aspects of Literacy which are integral to the lifelong learning, future financial and social stability and success of literate students.