Our School Curriculum

AUSTRALIAN CURRICULUM

The Australian Curriculum is designed to help our students to become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens.

Learning at MVPS focusses on the 8 learning areas that are determined by the Australian Curriculum. Areas of learning are often integrated to ensure learning is relevant and engaging.

Students in Reception to Year 7 learn in the following curriculum areas:

English which includes language, literacy and literature

Mathematics which includes number and algebra, measurement and geometry, statistics and probability

Science which includes Science understanding, Science as a Human Endeavour and Science Inquiry

Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) which include History, Geography, Civics and Citizenship and Economics and Business

The Arts which includes Dance, Drama, Media Arts, Music and Visual Arts

Languages which at MVPS is the teaching of Auslan

Health and Physical Education which includes personal, social and community health, movement and physical activity

Technologies which include Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies

GENERAL CAPABILITIES

In the Australian Curriculum, capability encompasses knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions. Students develop capability when they apply knowledge and skills confidently, effectively and appropriately in complex and changing circumstances, in their learning at school and in their lives outside school.

The General Capabilities in the Australian Curriculum are:

Literacy

Numeracy

Information and Communication Technology

Critical and Creative Thinking

Personal and social capability

Ethical understanding and Intercultural understanding

The Cross-curriculum Priorities in the Australian Curriculum are:

Sustainability

Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and Cultures

SPECIALIST LEARNING AREAS

At Morphett Vale Primary School students go to specialist teachers for some Learning areas. Our Specialist learning areas include: The Arts – Music and Drama, Languages – Auslan, Health and Physical Education.

S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering,Arts and Mathematics)

STEAM learning focuses on real-world issues and problems; students address real social, economic and environmental problems and seek solutions. Learning in STEAM is guided by the engineering design process. The EDP provides a flexible process that takes students from identifying a problem – or a design challenge – to creating and developing a solution. STEAM learning immerses students in hands-on inquiry and open-ended exploration. Through STEAM, the path to learning is hands on and collaborative and decisions about solutions are student-generated. Students communicate to share ideas and redesign their prototypes as needed. They control their own ideas and design their own investigations. STEAM allows for multiple right answers and reframes failure as a necessary part of learning (FAIL= first attempt at learning). The STEAM environment offers rich possibilities for creative solutions.

At Morphett Vale Primary School students play an active part in each step of their learning journey, from co-design to moderating on-line portfolios of learning evidence.

STEAM at MVPS is cross-curricular pedagogy which:

• empowers students
• engages students
• stretches student thinking
• connects learning to a students’ world now and into the future

STUDENT VOICE

At Morphett Vale Primary School, we want our students to be powerful learners who are engaged, creative, challenged, confident and successful.

We recognise that in order to develop powerful learners, we as educators need to explicitly teach, role model and scaffold learning dispositions.

Research (Australian Curriculum and 21st Century Learning Design) clearly recognizes that learning- how- to- learn capabilities are critical for student’s success in school.

Our “Pathway to Powerful Learners” program has been designed by students and is taught by students. Its aim is to support our students to develop the following dispositions in order to become “Powerful Learners”

• Collaboration
• Communication
• Problem solving
• Self-regulation
• Mindsets