The Devon Meadows Primary School curriculum draws on elements of the Victorian Curriculum to develop and implement a curriculum that is meaningful for students, with a strong commitment and focus on Literacy and Numeracy.
Literacy
In the Junior school students use The Fitzroy Readers, which are a set of 80 story books that children read for themselves. The Readers take the young learner from simple sounding words like cat and mat (in the 1st story) through to words like appreciative and consciousness (in the final story) in 80 easy steps. Children using the Fitzroy Readers typically reach a high standard of literacy by the time they enter early secondary schooling.
As our students progress and they become competent decoders of text our teaching focus shifts towards comprehension of text and various strategies to aid in the comprehension of text. At Devon Meadows Primary School in the higher Grades (3-6) we are applying the CAFE approach towards the teaching of comprehension and reading. The Literacy CAFE™ System helps students understand and master the four key components of successful reading:Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanding Vocabulary.
The comprehensive CARS & STARS program consists of ten levels (P–H) that allow you to identify and teach twelve reading and comprehension strategies, and improve literacy results. The program is divided into two parts: CARS (the assessment portion) and STARS (the instruction portion). We are currently teaching the twelve comprehension skills in conjunction with CAFE.
Numeracy Devon Meadows Primary School works at providing a guaranteed and viable Maths curriculum that offers all students the opportunity to succeed; our Numeracy Program reflects this belief.At Devon Meadows Primary we have a strong focus on teaching students at their personal level of ability. We want to inspire and challenge our students as best as we possibly can. Through assessment, small focus group instruction and creative lesson planning, we aim to teach students to their individual learning ability to support, challenge, extend and motivate all students. As students progress, we encourage them to use their voice and agency through the creation of their learning goal books. They choose their own learning goals based on their assessment results and use their class time to decide 'how to learn'. The classroom teacher provides a range of resources, concrete materials, technology and conference groups for different skills and the students are empowered to choose how they develop the necessary skills. They then need to demonstrate in their learning goal books how they have achieved their goal with an explanation and an example.All classroom programs and assessments are in line with the Victorian Curriculum. The areas include:
