LEARNING & TEACHING @ MFGSC
The Victorian Curriculum
The Victorian Curriculum Foundation–10 (F–10) was recently released by the Victorian Government.
http://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/
The Victorian Curriculum 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. Our teachers will start using the Victorian curriculum for their own curriculum design and we will start reporting using the Victorian Curriculum in 2017.
The Educator – Matthew Flinders recognised as an ‘Innovative School 2015’
http://issuu.com/keymedia/docs/te_1.2/20?e=1100026/30281389
We made the list of ‘Innovative Schools 2015’ in the magazine ‘The Educator’. The focus of the article is on Our Living Garden, but our new Digital Technologies curriculum and the student-run Maker Faire we hosted in Semester 1 for 120 primary school students were also recognised in the last paragraph.
Please click to view article
Lia Hills – poet and author – returns to MFGSC
We are thrilled to have Lia return to Matthew Flinders Girls to inspire a new generation of writers. Lia is currently working with our Year 7 and 9 students as part of the Invergowrie Grant we received in 2014.
Lia is helping our Year 9 students to generate ideas for their stories and narratives. She is introducing our Year 7 students to haiku, ‘rooku’ (an Australian adaptation of haiku), the notion of ‘wabi sabi’ and some different forms and approaches to ‘rooku’ writing. Our students are experimenting with some new techniques and Jade’s (7L) four poems reflect her experimenting with 4 different approaches.
Emerging Sciences Victoria Program 2016
Emerging Sciences Victoria is a virtual school for Year 10 students to study emerging sciences in real time with students around Victoria. John Monash Science School, in partnership with the Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET) and Monash University, has announced the launch of Emerging Science Victoria Semester 2016 Program.
ESV will enable our Year 10 (2016) and 9L (2016) Science students to study an emerging science subject as part of their Science curriculum. ESV offers 15 week courses in:
- Frontiers of Physics – Astrophysics and Quantum Mechanics
- Nanoscience
- Bioinformatics
- Logic 2 Magic (Conceptual Maths)
Students study these subjects at school via live, interactive video link to specialist teachers in the teaching studio at John Monash School in Melbourne. ESV provides access to a learning platform using Google Apps for Education, realsmart (a learning and assessment portfolio), all with single sign-in access via a website, and the Cisco Webex Video Classroom.
In Semester 2 this year we enrolled one of our Year 9L students, Dyota, in the Program as a trial. She’s found the experience challenging, stimulating and relevant to her career aspirations in biomedicine. She felt it also extended her understanding beyond her three periods of science.
The ESV programs are most suited for Year 10 and 9L 2016 students who are passionate about Science and wish to extend their knowledge into areas not part of the current Science curriculum at our school.
Damien Toussaint, Assistant Principal, Learning and Teaching