English

At Marlborough Primary School, English is taught in a knowledge, language, and text-rich environment. Through the English curriculum, our focus is to develop students’ speaking, listening, reading, writing, and thinking skills.

Because literacy forms an essential foundation for all learning, we place a strong focus in the early years on explicit, systematic instruction in core literacy skills. These include word-level reading, word-level spelling, oral reading fluency, handwriting and sentence-level writing. As students’ progress through the year levels, they apply, develop and build on these essential skills in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Instruction focuses on developing essential literacy skills, knowledge of reading and writing, knowledge for reading and writing, and building a love of learning, language, and literature. We use evidence-based methods to ensure all students succeed and thrive in this area.

Numeracy

At Marlborough Primary School we are committed to providing all students access to high quality and consistent teaching of Mathematics. Our teaching and learning teams plan collaboratively using student data and feedback. In doing so, we are able to better target our learner’s areas of need, clarify mathematical misconceptions and stimulate curiosity in maths.

Our Mathematics program is differentiated to suit the needs of each student. We ensure all students are challenged by providing open-ended tasks. These tasks have multiple points of entry and therefore, allow all students a means of achieving success and building upon their prior knowledge.

At Marlborough, we support students to develop life-long maths skills by teaching concepts in familiar and tangible ways.

Our Mathematics approach:

– We provide concrete experiences that allow students to explore and engage with maths concepts using hands-on materials

– We encourage visual thinking, use of pictures and modelling to bridge the connection between solving a problem with hands-on materials and writing the solution in an abstract manner

– We explicitly teach maths content and skills and provide students with multiple exposures to this content to help it retain in long term memory

– We provide authentic learning tasks with a ‘real world’ focus to promote problem-solving

– We develop fluency and understanding of basic facts through fun maths games

– We promote reasoning through rich class discussions and collaborative work

– We enrich students learning using our natural environment, including our frog bog, school grounds, STEAM lab and veggie garden