Curriculum

Reading is a vital life skill and a lifelong source of joy, imagination, and knowledge. It opens the door to learning, creativity, and understanding the world.

At POPS, our dedicated teachers use evidence-based approaches informed by the science of reading to deliver high-quality, structured literacy lessons.

A key framework we use is The Big 6 (Konza, 2014), which outlines the essential elements of reading:

• Oral Language – Speaking and listening to share ideas and emotions

• Phonemic Awareness – Hearing and working with sounds in words

• Phonics – Linking letters with their corresponding sounds

• Fluency – Reading with accuracy, speed, and expression

• Vocabulary – Understanding and using a wide range of words

• Comprehension – Making meaning from text

In Foundation to Year 2, we prioritise daily, explicit teaching of phonics and phonemic awareness through a systematic synthetic phonics approach. Students learn to blend and segment sounds, use decodable books, and build reading fluency, step by step. This structured approach sets children up for reading success now and into the future.

The Independent Writing Workshop, like the Reading Workshop, is a method of teaching writing using a workshop method.  Students are given opportunities to write in a variety of genres and this helps foster a love of writing.  The Independent Writing Workshop allows teachers to meet the needs of their students by differentiating their instruction and gearing instruction based on information gathered throughout the workshop.

Basic Structure of the Independent Writing Workshop

1. MINI LESSON: The mini-lessons for Writing Workshop teach concepts, strategies, and techniques for writing while encouraging students to write in different genres or styles.
2. INDEPENDENT WRITING FOR ALL STUDENTS: Most time of Writing Workshop is devoted to independent writing. During this time, students are prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing their pieces. Depending on the age and abilities of the students, independent writing can be as short as 15 minutes or as long as 45-60 minutes.
3. SHARE TIME/CLOSING CONVERSATIONS: Sharing is an extremely important component of the Writing Workshop. During the share portion, students contribute what they did during their independent writing time, either with the whole group or with a peer.  This gives students the opportunity to observe and learn from each other.

Literature about the Independent Writing Workshop:

• Reading and Writing Project

At P.O.P.S. all teachers use Sound Waves to teach spelling. Sound Waves is a word study program designed to develop reading, spelling and writing skills through phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is essentially a knowledge and understanding of the sounds and sound patterns of our language. The Sound Waves approach uses a sound-to-letter strategy, which acknowledges that sounds can be represented in more than one way. The Sound Waves approach focuses first on the basic units of sound in our language – phonemes. It then explores the letters that represent these sounds and how they can be put together to form the words in our language.

The four most important teaching steps in any Sound Waves week.

• Identify the Sound
• Brainstorm
• Sound Waves Student Book Activities
• Correct the Student Book Activities

Visit the Sound Waves website

At POPS, we foster a lifelong love of learning through a maths curriculum that is engaging, challenging, and fun, built on confidence, curiosity, and critical thinking.

Our goal is for every student to deeply understand key concepts, build fluency, and become confident problem solvers who can apply maths in real, meaningful ways.

Our Approach to Mathematics

We focus on four core concepts, our “big ideas” in maths learning, that help students build a strong foundation:

• Number Sense – Developing an intuitive feel for numbers and their relationships.

• Place Value – Understanding how digit position determines value.

• Multiplicative Thinking – Exploring multiplication and division as tools for deeper understanding.

• Fractional Thinking – Building a strong grasp of fractions and their everyday applications.

By connecting these concepts, we create a clear, structured learning journey where students grow in confidence and capability.

Building Mathematical Proficiency

The updated Victorian Curriculum 2.0 highlights four key proficiencies essential to maths success:

• Fluency – Accuracy, speed, and confidence in calculations.

• Understanding – Grasping concepts and applying them flexibly.

• Problem-Solving – Tackling real-world challenges using maths.

At P.O.P.S we use the PrimaryConnections 5Es teaching and learning approach is based on leading education research and encompasses:

• a 5Es teaching and learning model with distinct phases that structure the learning journey
• an inquiry and investigative approach that allows students’ questions to become the focus for student-planned investigations and the basis for developing scientific explanations
• students representing and re-representing their understanding using a variety of different literacies
• embedded, authentic assessment, including lots of formative assessment for learning
• collaborative learning opportunities, promoting more effective learning but also interpersonal skills such as engaging respectfully with other people’s ideas
• identifying linkages within the curriculum and outside of the classroom, to drive authentic and purposeful learning
• a focus on developing evidence-based reasoning and critical thinking skills
• Incorporating Indigenous perspectives

Students whose teachers use our teaching and learning approach have been shown to have higher achievement in science, the literacies of science, and literacy more generally.

For more details visit Primary Connections

Foundation to Year 4

Laying the foundations
As a starting point for learning students engage with their own experiences to help them understand the world around them. Students develop their spatial awareness through a consideration of the local community, the different groups in society and their place in one or more groups. By seeing and hearing about other places outside their experience, their sense of curiosity and wonder leads them to consider how and why other places are different from their own. Towards the end of Year 4 students distinguish and describe the natural and built features of the environments identifying and explaining changes. They make comparisons between a variety of places and develop their understanding of the geography of Victoria. They begin to develop an understanding of the interconnected nature of the world.

In these years students develop their knowledge and spatial awareness about where home, school and the playground are located and where they are in relation to one another. They extend their understanding to the geography of their local area and investigate and describe elements of the natural and human environments. Students develop a vocabulary to describe their observations and investigations.

Early in this stage students are involved in the drawing of simple pictorial maps of where they are in space in relation to other phenomena. Students develop increasingly sophisticated map skills enabling them to visualise and describe location and direction using grids and compass points.

Students explore how and why natural factors and human activities affect their lives. Beginning in their local environment, for example, selecting safe routes to schools (spatial concepts of location, direction and distance) they progress to group and collaborative tasks and consider environmental differences and resource management throughout Australia.

Years 5 to 8

Building breadth and depth
In these years with increasing cognitive development and experience, students begin to develop a breadth of understanding about natural processes and human activities beyond their immediate environment. They develop an expanded understanding of Australia and the region of which Australia is a part – the Asia-Pacific. Students begin to apply the more abstract cognitive processes to environmental issues.

Students apply their spatial awareness in a more sophisticated way to more complex questions and issues through the use of additional core concepts such as spatial interaction, movement, region and scale. Students identify patterns and processes in natural environments and human activities to understand increasingly complex interactions of physical and human phenomena within Australian and other environments and to generalise from particular contexts. They learn to use a process of inquiry that asks: What? Where? How? Why? What ought? They investigate environmental issues and analyse different perspectives and consider possible solutions to current and future challenges to enable sustainable use of resources. They describe and explain spatial changes through time from their own direct observation and by comparing maps, photographs and other visual media.

Students describe specific locations through reading and interpreting topographic and other large-scale maps. They apply their understanding of scale (distance), grids (location), compass bearings (direction) and legend to identify features and patterns and interpret trends when using maps as sources of information.

The History curriculum aims to ensure that students develop:

• interest in, and enjoyment of, historical study for lifelong learning and work, including their capacity and willingness to be informed and active citizens
• knowledge, understanding and appreciation of the past and the forces that shape societies, including Australian society
• understanding and use of historical concepts and skills, including sequencing chronology, using historical sources as evidence, identifying continuity and change,  analysing cause and effect and determining the historical significance
• capacity to undertake the historical inquiry, including skills in the analysis and use of sources, and an explanation and communication of arguments.

Students at P.O.P.S. focus on: