St Sebastian’s Primary School aspires to provide a challenging and motivating curriculum that builds on students’ knowledge and understandings of themselves and the world around them. Consistent with our Catholic ethos, our curriculum has a holistic approach to delivering excellent learning and teaching that aims to develop the whole child, preparing them to take their place in a rapidly changing world.

The promotion of each student’s progress and achievement is regarded as everyone’s responsibility. Learning and teaching is visible and occurs when learning is the explicit goal and feedback is given and sought from both teachers and students.  Both of these elements are pivotal in moving learning forward.

Our teachers, staff and students all become actively and passionately engaged in learning. A shared language of learning is evident in all classrooms and effective practices are consistently implemented across the school.

Students are encouraged, through active investigation in all areas of study, to unify rather than separate knowledge as they move from gaining of facts to understanding and developing broader concepts. Students become aware of why they are doing what they are doing and so develop a greater sense of control and responsibility for their learning. Skills such as careful observation, reasoning, problem solving, critical thinking and the ability to justify or refute existing knowledge are developed. Creative thinking and curiosity is stimulated in many ways.

• a solid foundation in knowledge, understanding, skills and values on which further learning and adult life can be built;
• deep knowledge, understanding, skills and values that will enable advanced learning and an ability to create new ideas and translate them into practical applications.
• general capabilities that underpin flexible and analytical thinking, a capacity to work with others and an ability to move across subject disciplines to develop new expertise.
• our learners will be able to answer three essential questions:
• How am I going? Where am I going? and Where to next?

The Australian Curriculum covers eight learning areas from Foundation (Prep) through to Year 6 in primary school:

•  English
•  Mathematics
•  Sciences
•  Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS)
•  The Arts
•  Languages – Japanese at St Sebastian’s School
•  Health and Physical Education
•  Digital Technology and Design & Technology
• and Religious Education,

Each teacher is responsible for the teaching of these Learning Areas.  Specialist teachers teach Music (see also Extra-Curricular Music), Physical Education and Japanese.

Literacy & Numeracy

Literacy

The study of Literacy is central to the learning and development of all students at St Sebastian’s School. We aim to create confident communicators, imaginative and critical thinkers and informed students who can analyse, understand, communicate with and build relationships with others and with the world around them.

• are able 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.
• can 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, faciliate interaction with others, entertain, persuade and argue.

Mathematics

Through our Mathematics learning, we aim to ensure that students: 

• are confident, creative users and communicators of mathematics, being able to investigate, represent and interpret various situations.
• develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of mathematical concepts and fluency with processes, and are able to pose, solve problems and reason. 
• recognise connections between the areas of mathematics and other disciplines and appreciate mathematics as an accessible and enjoyable discipline to study.