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Homeschool Australia K-12 Curriculum

Save time and simplify your homeschooling life...
Learn from experienced homeschoolers how to write your own curriculum. It really is that easy!

Use this website with Beverley Paine's Getting Started with Home Schooling - Practical Considerations to help you develop your own educational curriculum to suit your family situation, beliefs and lifestyle. The checklists can help you identify your children's current educational skill level in each subject area, as well as find any 'gaps' in their learning, plan what they need to cover or keep track of what has been learned.

Curriculum Pages Index

As you can appreciate this website is continuously under development... It's our aim to add pages on a regular basis in all curriculum areas: check back frequently. Feedback and comments welcome. We hope you enjoy the articles and activities and find the links and recommended resources useful.

Over the next year we will be working our way through each subject area and writing fresh, new content which will also be reproduced in a reasonably priced handy reference booklet from our Practical Homeschooling Series.

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"Thank you so much for your wonderful website! I was getting quiet frustrated with finding appropriate information on homeschooling - thanks to your website we are now on the right track... Using your checklists for reassurance helped me to have the confidence to come up with my own programme that suits our needs." Rachael

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"I checked out your website today and was incredibly impressed by it.  I can tell it will be a great resource for our family for many years.  THANKS for all the hard work that has gone into making homeschooling easier and much less isolating for families like us." Cynthia

Understanding Educational Jargon

© Beverley Paine

Yesterday I read part of the Level 1 Victorian Essential Learning Standards, a .pdf document that I had downloaded a couple of years ago. I've always made a point of reading school curricula – it helps to know what schools are thinking about how learning happens. I'm not overly impressed by this document, but I was heartened to see the glossary – always a good idea in any document of
this nature. As a fun exercise I went through the glossary and translated the jargon.

Jargon is all around us. The jargon we are most exposed to and probably notice the least is the jargon of advertising. It is always a interesting and
awareness-raising exercise to identify and translate advertising jargon with children, especially during the ad breaks while watching television. Analysing the words used in magazine or newspaper advertising, and then looking for these in the news items, is another way to see how our thoughts, actions and beliefs are cleverly manipulated by the media.

  • product: output of human activity in form of an artefact
  • technological product: artefact created to meet an identified need or want
  • sensory perception: seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, smelling...
    that is, experiencing life via the senses
  • technological process/technique: human activity (eg cutting, digging, shaping, usually carried out using tools)
  • skills, techniques and processes: ways and methods of using and
    handling just about anything
  • manipulate: handle
  • realise ideas/goals/effects/outcomes: achieve
  • outcome: result, usually expressed as a desired result (goal)
  • objective: what we hope to achieve
  • range of processes: use various methods
  • document: write, tape, film, take photos, etc what happened
  • multimedia resources: anything that includes words, images and sound; eg DVDs, internet, computer programs
  • media: can be anything one uses to create something as well as the way information is conveyed to others. Arts media - paper, canvas, paints, body (eg dance), clay, etc. Information media - books, television, internet, newspapers, etc.
  • investigations: opportunity to think up and ask questions and then
    work out ways to answer them
  • materials: anything that can be used to make into something else
  • information product: something that tells/shows others what you know
    using computerised technology
  • graphic/visual organiser: a way of showing on paper how different
    parts relate to each other or link together - map, flowchart, graph,
    time-line, etc.
  • design brief: a statement that tells why, how, where, when and just
    about anything else that is necessary to help solve a problem.
  • design: a map that shows how we transform ideas into action and
    results/products.

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Pioneering members of the home education movement in Australia, Beverley and Robin Paine are passionate advocates of true educational choice for families. They began homeschooling in 1986 and three years later started the South Australian Home Based Learners network. Beverley continues to write for homeschooling newsletters and magazines as well as hosting several websites dedicated to promoting and supporting home education in Australia. Her aim is to demystify the education process and make it accessible to all parents. Enjoy Beverley's wealth of practical knowledge, homeschooling and unschooling tips and ideas through articles and books and online at www.homeschoolaustralia.com. Since the late 1990s Robin and Beverley have been building their home education publishing business - Always Learning Books - from home with the help of their son Thomas.

"Education is not a preparation for life. Education is life itself." John Dewey

Please note that the opinions and articles included in the suite of Homeschool Australia websites are not necessarily those of Beverley and Robin Paine, nor do we endorse or necessarily recommend products (other than our own) listed in contributed articles, pages, or advertisements.

Please visit the following websites for information on homeschooling in Australia:

Homeschool Australia : SAHEN : Australian HS Curriculum : About the Paine Family

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