The Curriculum

The English curriculum at Pakenham Consolidated school is based on the Victorian Curriculum.

It aims to ensure that students:

• learn to listen to, read, view, speak, write, create and reflect on increasingly complex and sophisticated spoken, written and multimodal texts across a growing range of contexts with accuracy, fluency and purpose.
• appreciate, enjoy and use the English language in all its variations and develop a sense of its richness and power to evoke feelings, convey information, form ideas, facilitate interaction with others, entertain, persuade and argue.
• understand how Standard Australian English works in its spoken and written forms and in combination with non-linguistic forms of communication to create meaning.
• develop interest and skills in inquiring into the aesthetic aspects of texts, and develop an informed appreciation of literature.

Here is a link to the Victorian Curriculum if you would like to know more.  https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/ 

Implementation

• The English program is given a high priority with blocks of time (total of 2 hours per day) available daily across the school for the teaching of English.
• Students work in whole class, small instructional groups and on individual tasks according to their developmental stages progressing towards the acquisition of independent learning strategies.
• Students participate in daily writing experiences. They learn the process of writing: planning, composing, revising, editing and publishing.  Text types are modelled and explicitly taught across the whole school.
• ICT (Ipads, interactive white boards, computers and listening posts) are used at all levels as a part of our English curriculum.
• To encourage students to read at home, awards are presented at assembly and in classrooms to students who achieve designated numbers of nights reading at home.
• Resources used at Pakenham Consolidated include Fountas and Pinnell, Café, PM, Oxford Wordlists and Writer’s Notebooks.
• Pakenham Consolidated has a well-resourced library.