Ako / Learning

Learning at Poolburn School is fun, purposeful and connected. We take our responsibility of shaping young minds seriously and want our Year 8 leavers to be confident, connected learners, ready to take on the world.

At Poolburn school we have a strong focus on building foundations and then applying to real world practical tasks.

We use Structured Literacy across our school through the iDeal platform. We also use decodable readers at junior level then moving into all readers at fluency level. Seniors have a wide range of readers to choose from and children needing an extra boost have some great senior decodable texts. Our writing program transfers skills from our iDeaL platform and reading program.

We run a maths programme that is built on number foundations and strategies then moving into word problems and more complex problems that involve understanding what mathematical learning is, then solving the problem. We use platforms such as Mathletics and Education Perfect to help us deliver a great programme.

We use an inquiry based approach to teach our other curriculum areas holistically joining together through the help of New Pedagogies for Deeper Learning. This just means we focus on taking our learning deeper for the children by delivering our curriculum through current pedagogy, connecting ourselves to our community, using technology to deepen a task and using our local environment to build a curriculum that reflects that.

We make the most of our small school title and take our learning out of the classroom as much as possible. We are lucky enough to have the use of a van to help our adventuring and we try to get out each Friday, alternating classes in a session we call Rapunga Ra. Rapunga Ra is translated as our day for inquiring and adventuring.