At Carrington, the student’s core learning area is literacy and numeracy. To create meaningful, “real life”, learning experiences our school chooses to use an inquiry approach to learning via an integrated curriculum.

The program is designed to provide a comprehensive, sequential and integrated experience for students from prep through to year six. Whilst the program is integrated, there is a deliberate organisation of content to ensure a balance of perspective and an opportunity for students to engage in the specific challenges of each learning area.
The program has been structured as a set of units organised over a two-year cycle. The focus of each unit (or ‘topic’) has been selected using the following criteria:

- relevance and interest to students at particular stages in their schooling
- relevance to the needs and characteristics of the students in this community
- potential for the topic to link with rich concepts about ‘the way the world works’
- potential for the topic to encourage active inquiry
- availability of quality resources and direct experiences
- balance over each level’s cycle

The program has been prepared with continuous reference to the Victorian Learning Standards (VELS). Units have been selected that will support students’ in working towards relevant outcomes at their level. In addition to this, the staff at Carrington Primary School recognize that the content our students explore must help them develop the ‘big ideas’ necessary to make sense of information in a rapidly changing world. Their learning must go beyond the acquisition of knowledge and ensure that they become equipped with the skills, qualities and understandings that will enable life long learning.

An integrated approach to planning and teaching each of these units means that, although they will be essentially ‘hosted’ by one particular learning area – others have been connected and built into the overview. The areas of literacy, numeracy and the arts are used to design activities that have students accessing, processing, and communicating their learning in each unit.