Year 4
Depth, fluency and independence
How we teach in the Primary band — and why
The developing mind (Piaget)
Concrete operational: children reason logically about things they can see and manipulate. New ideas start concrete (materials, drawings, acted-out scenarios) and move to representations before abstract notation — the concrete-pictorial-abstract sequence.
Learning together (Vygotsky)
Scaffolds are structured and withdrawn in that order: worked examples first, then guided problems with on-demand hints, then independent work with none. Lessons script 'thinking aloud' so children internalise expert self-talk.
Our design commitments
- Explicit instruction with worked examples before any independent work
- Concrete–pictorial–abstract progression in mathematics
- Daily review and spaced practice built into the sequence
- Guided exploration tasks where children apply — not discover unaided — new ideas
Units open now
The Persuaders: Words That Win People Over
Learners discover that persuasion isn't luck or charm — it's engineering. They train as persuasion detectives who can name a text's purpose and split checkable facts from dressed-up opinions. Then they learn the blueprint every strong argument is built on — a clear position, reasons backed with evidence, a call to action — and the power tools that make it land: modality, emotive vocabulary, rhetorical questions and language matched to the audience. The unit ends with each learner planning, drafting, editing and actually delivering a persuasive text to a real audience about something they genuinely want to change.
🧭 Why it matters: Right now, someone is trying to persuade you — on a cereal box, in an ad before your video, on the poster at the shops. Once you know the tricks, they stop working ON you and start working FOR you. Want a later bedtime, a dog, a bigger say in where the holiday goes? Wishing louder won't do it — but a real argument, built properly, gets taken seriously. People who can argue clearly and fairly get listened to: in letters, in meetings, in their own families. That's the power this unit hands you — and the responsibility to use it fairly.
Big ideas
- Every text has a purpose — to inform, to entertain or to persuade — and the language features are the fingerprints that give it away
- Facts can be checked; opinions belong to someone. Strong persuaders use both, and sharp readers can always tell which is which
- Arguments have a structure: a position stated up front, one reason per paragraph backed with evidence, and a call to action at the end
- Word choice is a dial, not a switch — modality, emotive words and formality are turned up or down deliberately to suit the audience
Curriculum alignment (AC v9)
AC9E4LA01 · AC9E4LA02 · AC9E4LA03 · AC9E4LY03 · AC9E4LY05 · AC9E4LY06 · AC9E4LY07
Start this unit →Multiplication Mission: Thinking in Groups
Learners discover that multiplication is not a list of facts to memorise but a way of seeing — equal groups and arrays hiding everywhere. They build fact fluency to 10 × 10 through strategies they understand, uncover what really happens when a number is multiplied by ten, and use partitioning (their Year 3 superpower) to multiply two-digit numbers. Every lesson moves concrete → pictorial → abstract, with estimation as the built-in lie detector for checking answers.
🧭 Why it matters: Multiplication is the maths of real life moving fast: 6 friends at $4 each for the pool, 8 weeks of $5 pocket money, 24 players in 3 even teams, 250 people in 10 rows of seats. When you can multiply in your head, you know instantly whether you can afford it, whether the teams are fair, and whether the answer on the screen is right or rubbish. This unit turns you from someone who counts one-by-one into someone who thinks in groups — which is how mathematicians, coders, builders and shop owners all think.
Big ideas
- Multiplication is counting equal groups all at once — and arrays let you see it
- Every fact you know unlocks facts you don't: doubling, halving and one-more-group turn 20 facts into 100
- Multiplying by ten shifts every digit one place to the left, because our whole number system is built on tens
- Numbers can be partitioned to make multiplying big numbers easy, and estimation tells you if your answer makes sense
Curriculum alignment (AC v9)
AC9M4A02 · AC9M4N05 · AC9M4N06 · AC9M4N07 · AC9M4N08
Start this unit →May the Forces Be With You: Pushes, Pulls and Invisible Powers
Learners investigate forces the way scientists do — with their own hands, on their own floorboards and backyard grass. They discover that every change in motion is caused by a force: a push or a pull from one object on another. They meet friction, the contact force hiding between every two touching surfaces, and then two forces stranger still — gravity and magnetism — which pull on objects without touching them at all. Along the way they level up their inquiry skills: measuring with rulers and tape measures, recording results in tables, running repeated trials, and turning data into simple column graphs. The unit ends with a genuine engineering challenge — designing a ramp-and-runway course that stops a rolling object exactly inside a target zone, the same science behind the runaway-truck escape ramps on Queensland's steepest highways.
🧭 Why it matters: Forces run your whole day, whether you notice them or not — they're why your bike stops when you squeeze the brakes, why your thongs grip the pool deck, why the fridge magnet holds your artwork up all year without getting tired, and why a dropped mango always heads for the ground. Once you understand pushes, pulls, friction, gravity and magnets, you can bowl a better yorker, win at down-ball, pick the grippiest shoes for the school cross country, and understand how engineers stop runaway trucks on the Toowoomba Range. This is the science of everything that moves — including you.
Big ideas
- A force is a push or a pull exerted by one object on another — forces start, stop, speed up, slow down and change the direction of moving things
- Bigger forces cause bigger changes in motion, and the direction of the force matters as much as its size
- Friction is a contact force between touching surfaces; gravity and magnetism can pull on objects from a distance, without touching
- Scientists trust patterns in data: measure carefully, repeat your trials, record results in tables and graphs
Curriculum alignment (AC v9)
AC9S4U03 · AC9S4H02 · AC9S4I01 · AC9S4I02 · AC9S4I03 · AC9S4I04
Start this unit →Deep Time, First Contacts
Learners take on the biggest zoom-out in Australian history: the deep time story of First Nations Australians — hundreds of Nations, languages and Countries, connected and continuing today — then zoom right in on January 1788, when eleven ships changed everything. They practise the historian's hardest skill: reading a source while asking who made it, why, and whose voice is missing. Then they turn geographer, investigating why water and vegetation matter to every living thing in a dry country, and what it means to use resources so there is still enough tomorrow — something First Nations Peoples have practised for tens of thousands of years. The unit closes with a Big Story Exhibition that holds deep time, 1788 and the future together in one telling. Every lesson runs on evidence a nine-year-old can actually touch, question or count at home.
🧭 Why it matters: The place you live has one of the longest human stories on Earth — at least 65,000 years of it — and 1788 is the moment that story and another story collided. Understanding both sides of that beach makes you the kind of person who asks 'who's missing from this story?' — a question that will serve you in every news article, every argument and every history book for the rest of your life. And the sustainability part isn't homework about the future; it's about the tank, the tap and the bushland near your house right now, and the very old, very wise idea of taking only what you need.
Big ideas
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have lived on, managed and cared for this continent for at least 65,000 years — and those Nations, cultures and connections are living and continuing today
- The same event can be experienced completely differently by different people — good historians look for every perspective, especially the missing ones
- Environments — especially water and vegetation — are not backdrops; people and animals depend on them, so caring for them is caring for ourselves
- Sustainability means using what we need in ways that leave enough for the future — an idea First Nations custodians have practised and taught for tens of thousands of years
Curriculum alignment (AC v9)
AC9HS4K01 · AC9HS4K04 · AC9HS4K05 · AC9HS4K06 · AC9HS4S01 · AC9HS4S02 · AC9HS4S03 · AC9HS4S05
Start this unit →Game On! Play Smart, Bounce Back, Bring Everyone In
Learners discover the three superpowers that turn 'someone who plays' into 'someone everyone wants to play with'. First, strategy: reading space and timing so the game slows down in your head — the attack-and-defence thinking that transfers from tag to netball to down-ball to any sport you'll ever try. Second, resilience: what actually happens inside champions after a miss, a drop or a 10–1 flogging — the learning zone, the self-talk swap, and the truth that resilient does not mean never upset. Third, friendship as a skill set: inclusion moves that bring people off the sidelines, kind ways to stand up for a teammate, and the discovery that online kindness is the same friendship skill wearing a screen. The unit finale hands learners the whistle: they design and run their own Backyard Games — a mini tournament engineered so players of every age and ability get a real chance, losing well earns points, and nobody spends the afternoon watching from the fence.
🧭 Why it matters: These three superpowers show up everywhere for the rest of your life. Strategy is why the smallest player on the court is so often the hardest to beat — and one day it's how you'll plan projects, chess moves and road trips. Resilience is the difference between 'I had a bad game so I quit' and 'I had a bad game so I practised' — and it works exactly the same on fractions, guitar and job interviews. And friendship skills decide whether the park, the team chat and the classroom feel brilliant or lonely — for you AND for the kid watching from the fence, hoping someone says 'want a game?'. You're not just learning PE. You're learning how to be someone people love playing with.
Big ideas
- Strategy is thinking inside the rules: where to be, when to move and what to do next — and it transfers across games and sports
- In attack you create space; in defence you close space down — the same two ideas power almost every team game ever invented
- Resilience is not never being upset — it's feeling the feeling and having another go; skills grow fastest in the learning zone, fed by self-talk that helps
- Friendship is a set of skills you can practise: including others, standing up kindly, seeking help, and being as kind through a screen as face to face
- Great games are designed, not lucky: rules and scoring can be engineered so that every player — any age, any ability — gets a genuine go
Curriculum alignment (AC v9)
AC9HP4M01 · AC9HP4M02 · AC9HP4M03 · AC9HP4M07 · AC9HP4M08 · AC9HP4P01 · AC9HP4P04 · AC9HP4P06 · AC9HP4P08
Start this unit →Compose, Choreograph, Curate
This unit runs on one big secret: artists don't wait for magic — they make decisions. Learners spend three weeks making those decisions themselves. First they compose: layering a steady beat, a repeating ostinato and a melody into real music built from kitchen sounds and body percussion, and inventing their own way to write it down. Then they choreograph: turning an everyday action into a movement phrase, transforming it with levels, dynamics and canon, and teaching it to their household like a professional. Then they plan a visual artwork the way working artists do — thumbnails first, colour tested for mood, medium chosen on purpose — before making it for real. And in the capstone they discover that curating is an art form too: they select, sequence, label and hang everything they've made into a family gallery show with a live performance program and an opening night. Along the way they respond to Australian artists across every form — Elena Kats-Chernin's looping piano, Yothu Yindi's layered sound, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly paintings and Emily Kame Kngwarreye's vast canvases — always asking the maker's question: what did this artist choose, and why?
🧭 Why it matters: By the end of this unit there will be an actual exhibition in your actual house — your music playing, your dance performed, your artwork hung at exactly the right height, your labels beside every piece, your family walking through as opening-night guests. That's not pretend: it's the same craft used by every gallery, every stage show and every album you've ever loved. Once you've composed, choreographed and curated for real, you'll never watch a performance or walk through a gallery the same way again — you'll see the hundreds of decisions hiding inside it, because you've made those decisions yourself.
Big ideas
- Artists make decisions, not magic — composers layer sounds on purpose, choreographers shape movement on purpose, painters plan before they paint
- Every art form has elements you can name and control: beat, rhythm and melody in music; levels, dynamics and canon in dance; colour, composition and medium in visual art
- Responding to another artist's work means asking 'what did they choose, and why?' — and every answer you find makes your own choices stronger
- Curating is an art form too: choosing, ordering and presenting works creates a story that the works can't tell alone
Curriculum alignment (AC v9)
AC9AMU4E01 · AC9AMU4D01 · AC9AMU4C01 · AC9AMU4P01 · AC9ADA4E01 · AC9ADA4D01 · AC9ADA4C01 · AC9ADA4P01 · AC9AVA4E01 · AC9AVA4D01 · AC9AVA4C01 · AC9AVA4P01
Start this unit →Data, Systems and the People We Design For
Learners stop being users of technology and start being makers and questioners of it. They run a real data investigation at home — deciding the rules before they collect, cleaning the mess, and choosing a graph that tells the truth (then catching one that doesn't). They trace a single message from a screen in the kitchen to a screen across the country, discovering that 'the cloud' is a building with a postcode, and practise the everyday citizenship that goes with it. Then the unit turns outward: they interview a real human properly, watch that human struggle without rescuing them, and build, test and revise a solution based on evidence rather than opinion. No devices are required at any point; coding is offered, never demanded.
🧭 Why it matters: Every day someone shows you a graph and asks you to believe it — a news headline, a game's 'most popular' list, an ad claiming nine out of ten people agree. Every day you send messages that travel through real cables and real buildings owned by real companies. And one day, someone will need something built: a ramp for Nan's walker, an app for a footy club, a better way to remember the bins. This unit gives you the three powers that sit behind all of it — telling the truth with data, understanding the machines instead of just tapping them, and designing for the person in front of you rather than the person in your head. These are the powers that turn 'I use technology' into 'I make it, and I can tell when it's fibbing to me'.
Big ideas
- Data is the raw stuff you collect; information is what it tells you once it's cleaned, organised and represented — and the representation can lie
- A digital system is hardware, software and a network working together — nothing happens by magic, and every file lives somewhere physical
- You are not your user: the only way to know what someone needs is to ask open questions and watch them try
- Good designers change their design because of evidence, not because of the loudest opinion — including their own
Curriculum alignment (AC v9)
AC9TDI4K02 · AC9TDI4K03 · AC9TDI4P01 · AC9TDI4K01 · AC9TDI4P05 · AC9TDI4P09 · AC9TDE4P01 · AC9TDE4P02 · AC9TDE4P03 · AC9TDE4P04
Start this unit →Everyday Japanese: Conversations and Cultural Windows
Learners move from single words to real exchanges: greeting someone properly, saying who they are, asking and answering how old someone is, how they are, what their favourite things are, and what they like and dislike. They meet three little Japanese job-words — wa, o and ka — not as grammar terms but as workers with jobs: wa points at the topic, o tags the thing an action lands on, and ka turns any sentence into a question. Hiragana is consolidated row by row (k-, s-, t-) with stroke order described in words so it can be practised with a pencil and no video. Alongside the language, four cultural windows open onto seasons and festivals (hanami, Tanabata), food culture and the phrases that bookend a meal (itadakimasu, gochisōsama deshita), and everyday school life — each one compared honestly with the learner's own Australian week. The unit finishes with a Japanese Table: a hosted, spoken showcase where the learner runs a real conversation and explains one cultural window in their own words. This unit has no recorded audio; pronunciation is taught with a consistent written respelling system and practised out loud with a helper.
🧭 Why it matters: About one and a half million people visit Japan from Australia and come home saying the same thing: the moment they used even four words of Japanese, something changed. Shopkeepers smiled. Someone helped them find the train. A conversation happened that would not have happened otherwise. That is the honest, practical purpose of this unit — not fluency, which takes years, but the first real handshake: being able to greet someone, say who you are, ask a question, understand the answer, and say thank you like you mean it. There is a second purpose that matters just as much, and it works even if you never leave Australia. Learning a second language rewires how you see your first one. Once you have noticed that Japanese puts its action word last and glues little job-words onto its nouns, you can never again think English is just 'how language works' — it is one option out of thousands. Kids who learn that early grow into adults who assume other people's ways of doing things make sense from the inside. That is worth more than any phrasebook.
Big ideas
- A language is not a code for English — Japanese builds sentences in a different order, and little job-words (wa, o, ka) do work that English does with word order and tone of voice
- Sound matters: in Japanese, holding a vowel for two beats instead of one can change the word entirely, so long vowels are part of the spelling, not decoration
- Writing systems are learnable in small, patterned steps — hiragana is a row of five sounds at a time, each character built from strokes in a fixed order
- Language is a window into how people live: the words a culture uses every day (itadakimasu, o-genki desu ka) show what that culture notices and values
- Comparing two cultures fairly means describing both, noticing what varies inside each one, and never turning 'different from mine' into 'strange'
Curriculum alignment (AC v9)
AC9LJ4C01 · AC9LJ4C02 · AC9LJ4C03 · AC9LJ4C04 · AC9LJ4C05 · AC9LJ4U01 · AC9LJ4U02 · AC9LJ4U03 · AC9LJ4U04
Start this unit →Full year scope
English
Novel study, information writing, author's craft
Mathematics
Multiplicative fluency, fractions and decimals, angles and area
Science
Forces, life cycles and food webs, Earth's surface
Humanities and Social Sciences
First contacts, early European exploration, sustainability of places
Health and Physical Education
Movement strategy, resilience and friendships
The Arts
Composing, choreographing and curating
Technologies
Data, digital systems and user-centred design
Languages
Everyday conversations and cultural windows