Australian Curriculum Overview
English
The Foundation English curriculum is structured around three interrelated strands: Language, Literature and Literacy. These strands work together to develop students’ skills in listening, reading, viewing, speaking, writing and creating. Learning is recursive and builds on prior knowledge, including the Early Years Learning Framework.
In Foundation, students learn that English is the shared language of the classroom and use it to communicate with familiar audiences for different purposes. They engage with a variety of enjoyable texts—spoken, written and multimodal—including picture books, stories, rhymes, poetry, non-fiction, and performances. These texts reflect diverse cultures, including First Nations oral traditions, and literature from Australian, Asian and global authors.
Reading development occurs in a text-rich environment, supported by both decodable texts aligned with phonics instruction and simple authentic texts. These texts help students practise decoding and build familiarity with high-frequency words, sentence structures and everyday content.
Students also begin creating short imaginative and informative texts using pictures, words, and spoken language, tailored to a small range of purposes and audiences.
Mathematics
Understanding includes connecting names, numerals and quantities. Fluency includes readily counting numbers in sequences, continuing patterns, and comparing the lengths of objects Problem Solving includes using materials to model authentic problems, sorting objects, using familiar counting sequences to solve unfamiliar problems, and discussing the reasonableness of the answer. Reasoning includes explaining comparisons of quantities, creating patterns, and explaining processes for indirect comparison of length.
Science
In Foundation, students observe and describe the behaviours and properties of everyday objects, materials and living things. They explore change in the world around them, including changes that impact on them, such as the weather, and changes they can effect, such as making things move or change shape. They learn that seeking answers to questions and making observations is a core part of science and use their senses to gather different types of information.
HASS
The Foundation curriculum provides a study of personal and family histories. Students learn about their own history and that of their family; this may include stories from different cultures and other parts of the world. As participants in their own history, students build on their knowledge and understanding of how the past is different from the present.
Health and Physical Education
The Foundation Year curriculum provides the basis for developing knowledge, understanding and skills for students to lead healthy, safe and active lives. Students develop and practise fundamental movement skills through active play and structured movement activities.