Year 7

Disciplinary thinking begins

How we teach in the Middle Years band — and why

The developing mind (Piaget)

Emerging formal operational thought: hypothetical reasoning, abstraction, systematic testing of ideas. Abstract notation and models are introduced deliberately, still bridged from concrete cases.

Learning together (Vygotsky)

The ZPD widens with motivation: scaffolds are available on demand rather than default. Disciplinary thinking — like a mathematician, scientist, historian — is modelled explicitly before being handed over.

Our design commitments

Subject-specialist depth with explicit disciplinary literacy
Argumentation and evidence: claim–evidence–reasoning across subjects
Longer inquiry cycles bookended by explicit instruction and structured reflection
Purpose and relevance foregrounded to sustain adolescent engagement

Units open now

English

Shape-Shifters: One Story, a Thousand Tellings

Welcome to secondary English, where the question stops being 'what happened in the story?' and becomes 'who is telling it, in what kind of story, and what are their words doing to me?' Learners begin with genre — the contract every text signs with its reader, made of conventions that select, shape and promise — and watch one ordinary event become news, horror and comedy without a single fact changing. Then perspective: what a narrator can see, what they cannot, and what happens when the teller can't quite be trusted. Then the toolkit itself — connotation, tone and imagery — the word-level machinery that colours every sentence a writer builds. The unit closes with the Shape-Shifter's Folio: one true event from the learner's own life, told twice in deliberately opposed genre-and-narrator pairings, with a writer's statement that names every choice like a professional.

🧭 Why it matters: This is your first year of secondary English, and here's the honest deal: from now until Year 12, nearly every task you're set will be some version of two questions — 'how has this writer shaped this text, and why?' and 'now shape one yourself, on purpose.' This unit hands you the master keys early. Once you can see genre working, you'll see it everywhere: in movie trailers that promise you a genre in fifteen seconds, in news feeds that dress opinion as reporting, in the way your own retelling of an argument somehow always casts you as the hero. That last one is perspective, and noticing it in yourself is a genuine life skill. And the toolkit — connotation, tone, imagery — is what separates writing that gets read from writing that gets skimmed, in essays, applications, captions and every message where it matters how you sound. You spent primary school learning to read stories. This is the year you start reading writers.

Big ideas

Genre is a contract, not a container — its conventions promise the reader a certain experience, select which details matter, and can be honoured, bent or deliberately broken
Every story is told from somewhere: a narrator's position decides what can be seen, what stays hidden, and whose side the reader lands on — often without the reader noticing
Words carry more than their definitions — connotation, tone and imagery are how writers make a reader feel something before they've had time to think
Writers make choices, not accidents: the same craft you learn to detect in other people's texts becomes deliberate power in your own

Curriculum alignment (AC v9)

AC9E7LA03 · AC9E7LE01 · AC9E7LE05 · AC9E7LE07 · AC9E7LY03 · AC9E7LY05 · AC9E7LY06 · AC9E7LY07

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Mathematics

The Generalising Machine: Where Arithmetic Grows Up

You have been doing algebra since your first pattern train in Year 1 — you just haven't been allowed to call it that. This unit hands over the real machinery: pronumerals that stand for any number, expressions you can build and tidy, formulas you can test-drive by substitution, equations you can crack with backtracking and the balance scale, and finally rules that turn into dead-straight lines across the four-quadrant plane you mapped in Year 6. Every lesson starts with something you can hold or sketch before the symbols arrive, keeps estimation running as your built-in lie detector, and treats you as the independent mathematician you now are — a helper is welcome at the table, but this maths is yours to drive.

🧭 Why it matters: Algebra is the language every quantitative field speaks — the spreadsheet formulas behind a business, the physics of a skate ramp, the code inside every app, the dosage rules a vet scales to an animal's weight. But the honest reason comes first: from this year on, maths stops asking 'what is the answer?' and starts asking 'what is the rule?' — and rules are power. Write the rule once and you've solved a million problems at a stroke. This unit is where you stop being someone who calculates and start being someone who generalises — which is also, quietly, where proof begins.

Big ideas

Algebra is generalised arithmetic: a pronumeral is a number in disguise, and every rule you write about it must survive being tested with real numbers
An expression is a recipe, not a riddle — like terms collect because five of a thing and three of a thing make eight of that thing, whatever the thing is
The equals sign is a balance, not a 'here comes the answer' drumroll: whatever you do to one side, you owe the other
Solving an equation is undoing a journey — backtrack through the operations in reverse, then verify by substitution, because a checked answer is the only finished answer
A rule connecting two variables draws a picture: linear rules march in equal steps, so their points line up dead straight on the Cartesian plane

Curriculum alignment (AC v9)

AC9M7A01 · AC9M7A02 · AC9M7A03 · AC9M7A04 · AC9M7A05 · AC9M7N07

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Science

Sort, Separate, Trace: How Scientists Make Sense of a Messy World

This unit teaches you the three moves that turn a confusing world into a workable one. You start by SORTING: scientists classify living things using shared structural features and a hierarchical system, which is why a dolphin sits with the mammals and not with the fish, and why 'it swims, so it is a fish' is the kind of reasoning that classification was invented to defeat. You build and test your own dichotomous key on real backyard organisms. Then you SEPARATE: the same sorting logic applied to matter. You learn what makes a substance pure and a mixture impure, and you separate mixtures using physical properties — sieving, decanting, filtering, evaporating, distilling, magnetic separation — proving as you go that dissolving is not reacting and that a solute you cannot see has not gone anywhere. Then you TRACE: forces are the pushes and pulls that move all this matter around, and you learn to identify contact and non-contact forces, draw them as scaled arrows, and predict motion from whether they balance. You test whether heavy objects really do fall faster, and find out what is actually going on. Finally, the three moves combine on the biggest system in the unit: water. You follow water through Earth's spheres, through a Queensland catchment, through evaporation and condensation and infiltration and runoff, and into a real water-quality question you investigate yourself. The unit closes with a catchment investigation and report written for a real audience — an authentic first taste of secondary practical science.

🧭 Why it matters: Every one of these three moves is already a job somebody does, and most of them are jobs somebody does in Queensland. Sorting: biosecurity officers at Brisbane Airport identify organisms from structural features, because a misidentified insect can cost an industry hundreds of millions; ecologists surveying a creek need to know what they are looking at before they can say whether it is healthy. Separating: water treatment plants are separation machines at city scale — screening, settling, filtering, disinfecting — and a mineral processing plant on the Central Queensland coast is the same idea applied to ore. Tracing: engineers who size a stormwater drain, farmers who decide when to irrigate, and hydrologists who forecast a Brisbane River flood peak are all tracing forces and water. And the personal version matters too. You will be able to read a water quality report, argue about a dam or a bore with actual numbers, work out why your tank water tastes different after a storm, tell a genuine chemical reaction from something merely dissolved before you ruin an experiment or a recipe, and predict what a force will do before it does it. This is the science that Year 8 assumes you own, and by the end of this term you will.

Big ideas

Scientists classify by shared structural features, not by superficial resemblance — grouping by how something looks or where it lives leads you wrong, grouping by how it is built leads you right
A pure substance contains one kind of matter; a mixture contains more than one, and because the components keep their own physical properties, those properties are the handles you use to separate them
Dissolving is a physical change, not a chemical reaction: the solute is still there, unchanged, and mass is conserved whether you can see it or not
Forces are pushes and pulls that act by contact or at a distance; motion changes only when forces are unbalanced, and gravity accelerates all masses equally when air resistance is out of the way
Water is cycled, not consumed — it moves through Earth's spheres and through catchments, and every use, every hard surface and every contaminant changes where it goes and what it carries
Year 7 investigators write an aim and a hypothesis, control variables, quantify uncertainty, and evaluate the validity of their own method rather than only its fairness

Curriculum alignment (AC v9)

AC9S7U01 · AC9S7U06 · AC9S7U04 · AC9S7U02 · AC9S7H01 · AC9S7H03 · AC9S7I01 · AC9S7I02 · AC9S7I03 · AC9S7I04 · AC9S7I05 · AC9S7I08

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Humanities and Social Sciences

How We Know: Ancient Worlds, Water and the First Markets

Welcome to secondary HASS, where the question changes. Primary school asked 'what happened?'; from now on the sharper question is 'how do we KNOW what happened?' Learners build the historian's toolkit — primary and secondary sources, archaeology, dating methods, corroboration — and immediately put it to work on the deepest history on Earth: Australia's, from the 65,000-year-old floor of Madjedbebe rock shelter to the ancient burials at Lake Mungo to the Gunditjmara aquaculture systems at Budj Bim that are older than the pyramids and now World Heritage listed. Then the toolkit travels: to ancient Egypt, read not through mummy-movie clichés but through genuine sources — the Rosetta Stone, the ostraca of the tomb-builders' village at Deir el-Medina, and the papyrus that records the world's first documented strike, around 1157 BCE. Threaded through both worlds is geography's oldest pattern: settlements rise where water is, from the Nile's floods to Tae Rak's engineered wetlands to the dams and bores that keep Queensland liveable — and economics' oldest institution, the market, from grain wages and copper-weight barter to the barcode. The unit closes with a Museum of How We Know: learners curate their own exhibition, write honest labels that admit what each source cannot tell us, and defend their choices like working curators.

🧭 Why it matters: From here on, most of what you will ever 'know' arrives second-hand — feeds, clips, headlines, someone's confident claim. This unit installs the questions that separate knowledge from noise: who made this source, when, for what purpose, and what can it genuinely prove? You will practise on the hardest material there is — events with no living witnesses, tens of thousands of years old — because a person who can weigh evidence about 1157 BCE can absolutely weigh evidence about last Tuesday. Along the way you pick up two bonus superpowers: a geographer's eye that can look at any town (including yours) and explain why it exists where it does, and an economist's eye that watches every price and asks who set it and why. Evidence, water, markets: three lenses you will use every week for the rest of your life.

Big ideas

History is not a list of facts but an argument from evidence — every claim about the past should be able to answer the question 'how do we know?'
Ancient does not mean over: Australia's First Nations Peoples hold the oldest continuous cultures on Earth, and their communities today lead the research and care of their own deep history
Water writes the map of human settlement — where it flows, floods and fails explains where people have lived for 65,000 years, and where they can live next
Markets are ancient human technology: wherever people specialise, they trade — and a Year 7 who can read an ancient ration record can read a modern price tag with the same critical eye

Curriculum alignment (AC v9)

AC9HH7K03 · AC9HH7K10 · AC9HG7K02 · AC9HE7K01 · AC9HG7K05 · AC9HG7K06 · AC9HH7S01 · AC9HH7S02 · AC9HH7S03 · AC9HH7S04 · AC9HH7S06 · AC9HH7S08 · AC9HG7S02 · AC9HG7S03 · AC9HG7S04 · AC9HG7S06 · AC9HE7S03 · AC9HE7S05

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Health and Physical Education

Becoming You: Health, Identity and Respect in the Year Everything Shifts

This unit is about the person you are becoming and the systems you are now old enough to run yourself. You start with the SYSTEM: sleep, movement and mood are not three separate topics but one connected loop, and you can prove it, because you are going to run a proper two-week experiment on your own routine with a baseline, one deliberate change and your own recorded data. Along the way you get the calm, factual version of what happens in adolescence — bodies grow at different rates, brains rebuild the parts that handle planning and feelings, energy and sleep timing shift for real biological reasons — and the single most useful fact in the whole topic, which is that everybody runs on their own timeline and always has. Then you build IDENTITY: not by finding some hidden true self, but by mapping what you are actually good at, what you actually value, and what you keep choosing to do. Your ParkSyde ways-in profile is the starting map here, and you will test it against evidence from your real life. Then RESPECT, which is where the practical social skills live: what a boundary is, how consent works as an ordinary everyday thing — hearing a stop in a backyard game, asking before you borrow, post, tag or share — how to recognise the patterns of disrespect early rather than late, and exactly who to go to when something is not okay. Finally MOVEMENT AS IDENTITY: you find the activity that genuinely fits you rather than the one you assume you are supposed to like, and you build a four-week personal movement project around it, with a baseline, a progression and evidence of your own improvement. Movement runs through every single lesson, because you learn far more about all four topics with your body moving than sitting still reading about them.

🧭 Why it matters: Almost everything in this unit is something you will use this week, not in some distant adult future. The sleep and mood experiment is the same method a sports scientist, a shift worker or a GP uses to work out what is actually driving how somebody feels — and once you know how your own system responds, you stop being at the mercy of a bad week and start having something you can adjust. Knowing the general facts about adolescent development means you stop quietly worrying about whether you are normal, because you will know that the range of normal is enormous, and you will know exactly who to ask when you want a real answer. The identity work is the groundwork for every choice ahead of you — subjects, teams, friendships, what you say yes and no to — and people who can name their own values make those calls faster and regret them less. The respect and consent skills are the ones that decide what your friendships actually feel like: being the person who hears a no the first time is a reputation that follows you, and being able to recognise a controlling or humiliating pattern early is genuinely protective. And the movement project is the difference between someone who quits activity at fifteen because they decided they were 'not sporty' and someone who is still surfing, riding, climbing, dancing or playing socially at forty. This unit is not about becoming a different person. It is about getting properly acquainted with the one you are turning into, and picking up the tools to look after them.

Big ideas

Sleep, movement and mood form one connected loop — change any one input and the other two shift, which means you can improve how you feel by changing something you actually control
Adolescence runs on individual timelines: bodies and brains change at very different rates in different people, variation is the normal state of things, and comparing your timeline to someone else's is simply bad data
Identity is built rather than discovered — it is made of strengths, values, roles and choices, it keeps updating, and knowing what you value makes hard decisions faster
Respect is observable behaviour, not a feeling: you can point at it, describe it and practise it, which also means you can spot its absence
Consent is an everyday practice — asking, listening, and honouring the answer you get — and it applies to games, gear, photos, group chats and personal space long before it applies to anything else
Disrespect follows recognisable patterns, and naming a pattern early and telling a trusted adult is a skill you are using, not a failure you are admitting
Movement is for every body and every kind of person, and the activity that sticks for life is the one that fits who you are — not the one you were told counts as real sport

Curriculum alignment (AC v9)

AC9HP8P01 · AC9HP8P02 · AC9HP8P04 · AC9HP8P07 · AC9HP8P10 · AC9HP8P08 · AC9HP8M01 · AC9HP8M08 · AC9HP8M06 · AC9HP8M05 · AC9HP8M09

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The Arts

Elect Your Form

Until now, Arts has meant a bit of everything. Year 7 is where that changes: you choose. Lesson 1 is a studio sampler — four short, genuine briefs, one in each room (visual arts, music, drama and dance, media arts), designed so you can feel the difference between the forms rather than guess at it — and then you elect a MAJOR, the form you will deepen, and a MINOR, the form you keep alive alongside it. You elect on evidence, using three tests that professionals recognise: the pull test, the friction test and the curiosity test, none of which is 'what am I already best at'. Lesson 2 is technique bootcamp, run in your elected form: what deliberate practice actually is (a specific target at the edge of your ability, immediate feedback, adjust, repeat — fifteen focused minutes beating three drifting hours), what the daily drill looks like in each of the four pathways, and how professionals in your form publicly describe their own practice. Lesson 3 develops one real work with its process documented: three options before one choice, criteria for the choice, a process journal your form can actually keep, a test audience of one, and a refinement you can point to. Lesson 4 brings the minor back — you collaborate across two forms on one work, present it to a real audience, and run the household through a critique protocol built to be warm, specific and actionable, because critique means discernment, not attack, and the difference is a skill you can learn in an afternoon and use for the rest of your life.

🧭 Why it matters: In senior secondary, arts subjects are chosen, not assigned, and they are assessed on folios and performances — a body of work plus your own account of the decisions inside it. This unit is where the choosing starts, and it is deliberately early, because two things take years rather than weeks: technique, which only builds through repeated deliberate practice, and taste, which only builds through making things and looking hard at them. Start at twelve and you arrive at senior arts with a practice already running. But the honest, wider purpose is this. Almost nobody in an arts career does only one thing. A game studio needs artists, composers, writers, animators and performers in the same room, on the same deadline, arguing productively. A theatre company's program credits a director, a designer, a composer, a movement director. Ludo Studio in Brisbane makes Bluey with animators, writers, voice actors and a composer working to one intention. So the two halves of this unit are the two halves of the job: go deep enough in one form to be genuinely useful, and stay fluent enough in the others to collaborate without needing a translator. And the critique protocol you learn in Lesson 4 — warm, specific, actionable, delivered and received without armour — will outlive every artwork you make this year. It is the machinery of every rehearsal, every code review, every design crit, every coaching conversation you will ever sit in.

Big ideas

Specialising is a decision made on evidence, not a verdict about talent — you elect a form because its problems are the problems you want to spend time on
Nothing you sampled is wasted: the forms share levers, and a minor kept alive is the raw material of every collaboration you will ever join
Skill is built by deliberate practice — a specific target at the edge of your ability, with feedback and adjustment — not by repeating what already feels comfortable
Process is the work: professionals generate options, choose against criteria, test on an audience and revise, and the documented trail of that is what art schools, companies and senior subjects actually assess
Critique is discernment, not criticism — warm, specific and actionable notes make work better, and receiving them without armour is a rarer skill than giving them

Curriculum alignment (AC v9)

AC9AVA8E01 · AC9AMU8E01 · AC9ADR8E01 · AC9ADA8E01 · AC9AMA8E01 · AC9AVA8E02 · AC9AVA8D01 · AC9AMU8D01 · AC9ADR8D01 · AC9ADA8D01 · AC9AMA8D01 · AC9AVA8C01 · AC9AMU8C02 · AC9ADR8C01 · AC9ADA8C01 · AC9AMA8C01 · AC9AVA8P01 · AC9AMU8P01 · AC9ADR8P01 · AC9ADA8P01 · AC9AMA8P01

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Technologies

Say It in Code, See It as a System

This unit takes you from clicking blocks together to writing real text-based code — and, just as importantly, to reading it. You start with the language itself: what a variable actually does when you assign to it, why a type is a promise about what a value IS, why = and == are two completely different instructions, and why a missing colon stops everything. You learn the single most useful skill in programming that nobody teaches early enough: hand-tracing, where you become the computer and fill in a trace table row by row until you know exactly what the program will output before anything runs it. Then you take on control flow — conditions, loops that stop, loops that do not, off-by-one errors — and functions with parameters and return values, including the difference between a function that prints and a function that gives something back. You learn to read a traceback methodically instead of panicking at it: error type, line number, the line above, one change at a time. Next you go underneath the language to find out what a computer is really holding: binary, and why two states beat ten, and how text and images turn into numbers, which is where types finally make total sense. Finally you zoom all the way out to systems thinking — inputs, processes, outputs and feedback — model a real system from your own life, hunt down its leverage point, and finish by writing and hand-tracing a program that simulates or manages part of that system. Every lesson is completable with paper and a pencil. A device is optional, everywhere, always.

🧭 Why it matters: Here is the honest reason this unit exists. Almost every job you might end up in now sits on top of software that somebody wrote, and the people who can read it have a kind of X-ray vision the people who cannot are missing. A farmer reading the logic in an irrigation controller, a nurse who spots that a rostering system double-counts night shifts, a small business owner who can tell whether a quote for an app is fair, an electrician configuring a solar inverter, a scientist automating a thousand measurements they would otherwise do by hand — none of those are 'programmer' jobs, and all of them are better done by someone who can read code and think in systems. Then there is the second power, which is arguably bigger. Systems thinking is how you stop treating the world as a pile of separate problems. Why does the canteen queue blow out on Fridays? Why does the household run out of clean uniforms on exactly the wrong morning? Why does a road get widened and end up just as jammed two years later? Why did the tank run dry when it rained last week? Those questions all have the same shape — stocks, flows, delays and feedback — and once you can draw that shape you can find the small change that fixes it instead of the big expensive change that does not. And the third power is the quietest: hand-tracing teaches you to hold a process in your head, step by step, and check it against reality. That is the habit that makes you good at chemistry, at accounting, at debugging a recipe, at reading a contract. You are not learning to type. You are learning to be exact on purpose, and to see the machinery behind the thing in front of you.

Big ideas

Syntax is precision, not pedantry: a text-based language has no judgement and no benefit of the doubt, so the exactness is what makes the machine reliable rather than what makes it fussy
A variable is a labelled box holding one value at a time, and assignment copies a value in — it is an instruction, not a permanent promise between two names
A type is an agreement about how to interpret a pattern of bits, which is why the same eight bits can be a number, a letter or a shade of red depending on what you told the machine they were
You can know what a program does without running it: hand-tracing with a trace table is how programmers reason about code, find off-by-one errors and prove a loop terminates
An error message is not an insult — it is the most specific help you will ever get, and reading it methodically beats guessing every single time
Everything is a system: inputs, processes, outputs and feedback, where feedback loops explain the behaviour and the leverage point is rarely the biggest part

Curriculum alignment (AC v9)

AC9TDI8K04 · AC9TDI8K03 · AC9TDI8P04 · AC9TDI8P05 · AC9TDI8P06 · AC9TDI8P09 · AC9TDI8P10 · AC9TDE8K03 · AC9TDE8P02 · AC9TDE8P04

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Languages

Tsunagaru — Sentences That Hold Hands: Connected Texts and Conversations in Japanese

Something changes in Japanese at Year 7. Until now you have been building sentences — correct, complete and completely separate, like bricks in a pile. This unit turns the pile into a wall. You learn the four connectors that link one idea to the next (そして soshite, それから sorekara, でも demo, だから dakara), the Japanese habit of dropping information that is already obvious instead of repeating it, and then the single most valuable pattern in the whole language: the て-form. The て-form is the hinge Japanese swings on. Master its formation rules — and they ARE rules, not a memory test — and three doors open at once: joining a run of actions into one flowing sentence, making polite requests with ～てください, and describing what is going on right now or ongoing with ～ています. Alongside the grammar you read real-shaped Japanese texts rather than textbook fragments: a junior high school timetable, a cafeteria menu with prices in yen, a phone message exchange between two friends. Your kanji set grows properly, with radicals and readings explained rather than dumped — the days of the week (月曜日 to 日曜日), 学校, 先生, 学生, 友達, 時, 分, 食, 飲, 円, 部, 毎, 今, 書. And you write two genuine pieces of Japanese: a self-introduction letter to a pen-friend, and a short diary entry about a real day of your life. The culture strand runs through the middle of it all — 部活 (bukatsu) school clubs and how Japanese school life is actually structured, how young people in Japan message each other, and a clear-eyed audit of how Japan gets represented on Australian screens, run as an evidence exercise rather than a lecture.

🧭 Why it matters: Japanese is the most widely taught language in Australian schools, and Japan is one of Australia's largest trading partners and closest regional relationships — so this is not an ornamental subject, it is a practical one. But the deeper payoff is bigger than any one language. When you learn how て-form works, you are training the exact skill that makes people good at every language, including code: spotting a rule that generates infinite correct outputs, instead of memorising outputs one at a time. When you learn to link ideas with そして and でも and だから, you are learning what makes writing hold together in ANY language — including the English essays you will be writing next week. When you read a Japanese timetable and work out 火曜日 from a kanji you have never formally met, you are practising the intelligent-guessing-plus-checking method that gets you through every unfamiliar document you will meet as an adult. And when you audit how Japanese teenagers are shown on Australian screens against what you actually know about them, you are building the habit that keeps you from being fooled about any group of people, anywhere, ever. Four connectors, one verb form, and a genuinely useful suspicion about your own screen.

Big ideas

A language is not a bag of sentences — it is text: real communication links ideas, signals relationships between them, and leaves out what the reader already knows
Japanese grammar rewards pattern-finding over memorising: the て-form has clear formation rules by verb group, and one form learned properly unlocks requests, ongoing actions and joined sentences all at once
Kanji are readable, not magic: a radical narrows the meaning family and sometimes hints at sound, but readings must be learned — informed decoding beats both guessing and despair
Learning a language means learning how a place actually works — school clubs, seniority, how a friend texts a friend — and noticing when your own country's media has been showing you a very narrow slice of it

Curriculum alignment (AC v9)

AC9LJ8C01 · AC9LJ8C02 · AC9LJ8C03 · AC9LJ8C04 · AC9LJ8C05 · AC9LJ8U01 · AC9LJ8U02 · AC9LJ8U03 · AC9LJ8U04

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Full year scope

English
Genre, perspective and the writer's toolkit
Mathematics
Algebraic foundations, linear relationships, geometry proofs begin
Science
Classification, mixtures, forces, water and Earth systems
Humanities and Social Sciences
Ancient worlds; water and liveability; markets and consumers
Health and Physical Education
Adolescent health, identity and respectful relationships
The Arts
Elected arts specialisations deepen
Technologies
Text-based programming and systems thinking
Languages
Connected texts and conversations