The School House
Displaying 31 - 40 of 40 articles
The Australian Curriculum describes what Australian children should know and do. The purpose of the recent review of the curriculum was to investigate whether the content of the curriculum was adequate…
Tony Abbott has given his ministers their report cards for the year. Apparently they are all receiving As and A+s. That might mean they are very, very clever compared to all other ministers who have done…
Why do kids prefer playing video games to doing homework? The easy answer is - it’s more fun to play games than do homework. The real answer is much harder to stomach - game designers have become better…
It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry every time (predominantly monolingual) politicians and policy makers lament the fact that we don’t have enough students in schools studying foreign languages…
New South Wales Education Minister Adrian Piccoli has announced no teacher will graduate in his state without having successfully completed a literacy (and numeracy) test. This follows an announcement…
There are a few key pieces of grammatical knowledge that can make an immediate difference to the quality of children’s reading and writing. In this column I look at verbs, and suggest four actions that…
The Education Minister has asked us all to contribute to a public consultation on how to get quality teachers in front of our children. But what does ‘quality teacher’ mean? We can crowdsource a national…
I’m going to put it out there - most teachers don’t know enough about how the English language works [aka grammar], and this inevitably impacts upon student literacy outcomes. There are grammar pundits…
We love our kids’ first drawings. They draw before they write, so their drawings seem somehow miraculous in those early years - their first communication that is permanent and there for all to see. Preschool…
A middle school student I know came home from school with the task to recreate a medieval fort out of cake. I expect the History teacher thought this was a creative and engaging activity. This particular…