Aberfeldie Primary School provides a comprehensive and challenging curriculum with a focus on achieving high standards in Literacy, Numeracy with a view that a strong foundation in these disciplines will lead to active community participants with the skills to participate in a challenging and changing world.
Aberfeldie uses the Victorian Curriculum which sets out what every student should learn during their first eleven years of schooling. The curriculum is the common set of knowledge and skills required by students for life-long learning, social development and active and informed citizenship.
Aberfeldie Primary School is a BYOD school from grades three to six. Digital Technologies is embedded daily across the curriculum. Responsible use of such technology is expected and the Acceptable Use Agreement ensures all users know their responsibilities.
Information about the Victorian Curriculum F–10 is available here.
The Learning Model
At Aberfeldie Primary School, we have an understanding of the process of learning, which underpins our instructional approach. That is, humans draw on the environment, working memory and long term memory, in order to think & learn.
These three elements of memory are related in the processes of learning, remembering and forgetting. We reach out into the environment and bring new information into our working memory. Thinking about the new information and making links to prior knowledge helps to move the information from working memory to long term memory. Information is forgotten when it is not attended to. In addition, a person can only process a limited amount of information at once, so too much information can lead to cognitive overload, limiting how much information can be transferred into long term memory. Once information is stored in long term memory, it can be remembered as required, or when the information is not retrieved frequently enough, it can be forgotten.
This model for learning is supported by a number of strategies that can help teachers to maximise student learning, optimising the load on the working memory. These are called Rosenshine’s Principles (Rosenshine, 2012).