Curriculum

At Aurora, health and wellbeing represents the ‘care’ we provide our students; but it also represents a critical area of learning in our curriculum. We teach the skills of personal care and independence. The everyday routines that involve eating, drinking, sleeping, toileting, applying sunscreen and cleaning up after ourselves are as valuable learning experiences as any other with academic outcomes. The students learn about responsibility, autonomy and agency and are supported to complete tasks. They can also develop a more definite sense of their own identity and belonging by establishing what they are capable of and what they can contribute to the group.

Teaching arts, as an expression, plays an essential role in the Aurora curriculum. Painting is not always only about the act of marking paper with paint. Which colours to choose and how big the brush stroke should be and how a child feels when they are painting form a type of self expression. The colour choices and brush strokes can form the starting point of the conversation to ask a child why they made those choices. Arts opens up an avenue to allow children to express their preferences, feelings and thoughts in a way that is unique to them.

Any observation of children tells us that they are not inclined to remain still, the natural desire to move suggests the importance of physical education in the development of gross and fine motor skills to understanding how the body works. A child’s first language is to move their body; an example is how a baby explores objects with their mouths asking the world “What is this thing?”.

At Aurora, we understand the importance of sharing books and recognise this is often the first formal learning experience children have with their families. By reading with children, from as young as possible, we can promote the development of listening and vocabulary, recognising sounds and pictures and later in a child’s development, reading and writing. All families should be involved with the Aurora library and no child, regardless of the resources they have at home should miss out on the incredibly important experience of reading a story with their families at home.

Play that promotes cause and effect, trial and error and problem-solving skills are all early opportunities for children to construct, engineer and design. To help our students make sense of their world, we encourage conversations about how a bridge works or how a car moves, to challenge a child to think beyond the previously accepted and extend their knowledge. It is also essential for children to feel that they have the potential to influence the world with their thoughts and actions.

Science and mathematics form essential points of cognitive development in children, at Aurora, we start with the concepts of counting things, understanding different shapes and patterns and continually asking why? Children often relate counting to their world very early on; wanting more or less, recognising big and small, how old they are or how many pets they have can start a conversation about mathematics. A big part of mathematical understanding for children is developing a vocabulary that they can use, so educators need to incorporate mathematical concepts and topics into day to day experiences and conversations.

All children are capable of making meaningful contributions to their learning, and at Aurora, we encourage students to bring their interests to life through project work. Students need the time and space to come and go from education, meaning that just because it is home time does not mean their experience needs to stop, it can be carried on at home or kept safe so they can pick it up again the following day. Our educators are creative in how they promote continuous learning at Aurora. Young children are limited with their concentration span, meaning they need to move from one experience to another. Project work offers an excellent opportunity for intentional teaching as it often requires instructions from educators, and the children can take turns with educators to be in charge of the learning.

Aurora focuses on our innate attraction to nature and natural processes as humans. Our curriculum incorporates the Biophilic theory, which suggests that we all have a genetic connection to the natural world built up through hundreds of thousands of years of living in agrarian settings. Biophilia is of ever-increasing importance to our health and well-being in our built-up environment. The biophilic design uses these ideas as principles to create a human-centred approach to learning with numerous benefits to our health and well-being.