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Teaching & Learning
Visual Arts
Visual Arts education at Darley plays a crucial role in fostering creativity, self-expression, and critical thinking among students from F-6. This program encompasses a variety of artistic disciplines, including drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and digital media, encouraging students to explore and develop their unique artistic voices.
Health & Physical Education
The Health and Physical Education program (H.A.P.E.) at Darley Primary School is designed to equip students with lifelong skills and knowledge for an active and healthy lifestyle.
Our comprehensive program provides all Foundation to Year 6 students with a diverse range of physical and sporting experiences tailored to accommodate varying abilities. The physical education component focuses on developing students’ Fundamental Movement Skills and integrating these skills to form more complex motor skills. These fundamental skills are cultivated through various programs, including gymnastics, dance, athletics, ball sports, water safety, and Safety on Wheels (bike and scooter education).
Students in Years 3-6 participate in athletics, cross country, and swimming carnivals, with the opportunity to progress through the School Sports Victoria pathway. Additionally, Year 5 and 6 students can compete in numerous interschool sports, including netball, AFL, soccer, tee-ball, hockey, rounders, cricket, Newcombe, basketball, and tennis.
STEM
At Darley Primary School, STEM education is driven by a science-focused curriculum, with an emphasis on hands-on learning and practical application. The program integrates the core disciplines of Earth and Space Science, Chemistry, Physics and Biology, giving students a broad understanding of the natural and physical world. Each term is dedicated to one of these scientific areas, allowing students to dive deeply into each subject.
AUSLAN
Darley Primary School offers a 50-minute Auslan program once a week from Foundation to Year 6. Our Auslan program is delivered in video form and signed by various Deaf and Hard of Hearing people. Students are supported in class by a Specialist teacher and wrist band to help remember which hand is their dominant hand. The program is curriculum aligned with Victorian and Australian curriculum codes. This comprehensive and accessible Auslan teaching program is a step towards bridging the communication gap between hearing and Deaf Australians.
Performing Arts
All students at Darley Primary School from Foundation to Year 6 attend one session of Performing Arts each week. Each session incorporates one of the three stands of Performing Arts – Music, Dance and Drama. We aim to encourage and support all students to participate in creative and collaborative activities that are enlightening, contemporary, challenging, relevant and most importantly…a lot of fun!
English
At Darley Primary School, students are taught to read and write using the latest research on best practices for teaching, drawing from the Science of Learning and Reading, along with a range of evidence-based strategies.
At the start of their schooling, students are supported to develop phonemic awareness, which helps them recognise sounds, rhymes, and syllables. This foundational skill leads to daily structured synthetics phonics lessons, where students engage with the phonics program Sounds Write.
Through our reading lessons, students have opportunities to develop their oral language skills, receive explicit vocabulary instruction, and enhance their comprehension using high-quality literature. Students are also given daily opportunities to read aloud, which helps them improve their reading fluency.
In Writing lessons, students begin by developing fine motor skills and the ability to form letters correctly. Building on their phonics knowledge, they learn to write short decodable words and sentences. Explicit instruction in sentence structure ensures that students understand what makes a sentence meaningful, which supports their ability to write longer, more complex sentences and paragraphs. Students are taught different genres of writing, including recounts, narratives, and persuasive texts, and practise writing about real-life experiences or stories they’ve read in class. They are encouraged to experiment with vocabulary and sentence structures as they discover their own voice as young authors.
Information & Communication Technology
All students at Darley Primary School utilise iPads and other relevant technology to support their learning across all curriculum areas. Class sets of iPads are available for Foundation to Year 2 classes to use and from Years 3-6 we have a BYOD program. We understand that students spend an increasing amount of time online and incorporating information technology into their everyday life, and these skills are vital communication and workplace skills to have as students get older. To be safe online and to gain valuable IT skills in the online environment, students need to be responsible and cyber safe. Safe and responsible online behaviour is explicitly taught at Darley Primary School.
Mathematics
Mathematics at Darley Primary School is a hands-on, inquiry based experience in which students acquire the knowledge, skills, understanding and confidence in order to use mathematics in a wide range of real-life situations. Students develop a common language that enables them to discuss and apply their knowledge and understanding gained through collaborative learning and problem-solving experiences.
At Darley Primary School, we believe that an understanding of numbers and a solid knowledge of mathematical concepts enables children to make authentic connections between related ideas and to apply their understanding in new and unfamiliar contexts.
Based on the new Mathematics Victorian Curriculum 2.0, our Mathematics program ensures students engage in the Strands:
Number, Algebra, Measurement, Space, Statistics and Probability (commencing at Level 3).
Our students enjoy taking part in World Maths Day, Virtual Maths Challenge Days and the Victorian High Achievers Program.