Our curriculum design and planning is ambitious and is intended to ensure that our children are able to:
- Enjoy success academically and aim high
- Success is a journey not a destination; you must be the change you want to see in the world; make your journey count.
- Draw upon personal qualities of belonging, mastery, independence, generosity, ‘grit’, risk-taking, resilience, struggling.
- We believe each child is an individual, and as such they are capable of making their own decisions
- Work co-operatively and respectfully with others
- As our Mission Statement says, to make valuable contributions to our community, wider society and become caring, tolerant citizens
- Understand how to sustain physical and mental health
At Black Firs, we craft and implement our curriculum to suit the needs of our children. We see every opportunity as a learning opportunity; everyone who has contact with Black Firs should be part of our learning. Our community is about modelling how we learn-to-learn things; our metacognition. It is about developing knowledge and skills and using them to broaden our understanding. An understanding that comes from the first-hand experiences we gather on our education journey. It is our understanding that we discuss and share; it is our understanding that academic education measures, tests and examines.
acquired or taught knowledge + personal interpretation = Our Understanding
At Black Firs we combine cognitivism and a constructivist view of educational philosophy. Our implementation focuses more on constructivism and so because of this we deliver a holistic curriculum.
As a child centred school, we place a child’s learning meme at the centre of everything we do. So, our curriculum is planned around the multiple-intelligences we all possess; we could consider an intelligence as being like a meme or ability. Each human being has a different composition of the ten intelligences; very importantly, there is no hierarchy among these capacities. We personalise our student’s learning and broaden their life-long education by addressing their multiple intelligence memes.
Next - Curriculum Implementation