All students will study

• Religious Education
• English
• Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS)
• Mathematics
• Science
• Japanese
• Health and Physical Education
• Digital Technology

Students across all ability levels engage with the same core subjects from the Western Australian Curriculum. However, differentiation may occur in English and Mathematics, where classes may undertake tasks at varying levels of complexity to support diverse learning needs.

Guidelines from the School Curriculum and Standards Authority (SCSA) require all students to complete at least one elective in each of the following areas: Digital Technologies, Design and Technologies, Performing Arts, and Visual Arts. To meet these requirements, each student will be enrolled in the following elective subjects, which run for one term each:

• Dance
• Design & Technology – Food
• Design & Technology – Fashion
• Design & Technology – Metal
• Design & Technology – Wood
• Drama
• Media
• Music
• STEM
• Visual Art

All students will study

• Careers
• Leadership
• Mercy Heritage
• Organisation
• Social and Emotional Learning

Homework provides students with the opportunity to revise concepts, consolidate and reflect on learning, target areas needing support, and prepare for the next day’s lessons. In Year Seven, most students should be completing about 30 minutes homework or study each day.

In Year Seven, students explore how people grow and learn from human experiences. They identify how people come to discover God, the Creator, and how God offers love and goodness to all. Students identify important Christian beliefs about God’s Son, Jesus, who modelled love and goodness. Students identify from Scripture and Church teachings, connections between the life of Jesus and the human potential to respect life and live for the common good.

Students describe how the Church, the Body of Christ, is present and active in the world today. They identify examples of how the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit to continue the mission of Jesus and to deepen people’s relationship with God. Students explain how the Church throughout history has drawn from Scripture and Tradition to hand on the teachings of Jesus. They identify diocesan structures that support the work of the Church.

Students describe how the sacramental life of the Church, initiated in Baptism and nourished through the Eucharist, is a new way of living that promotes the common good. This new way of living is modelled on Jesus’ teachings about reconciliation, social justice and peace.

In Year Seven, students communicate with peers, teachers, individuals, groups, and community members in a range of face-to-face and virtual environments. They experience learning in familiar and unfamiliar contexts that relate to an array of contexts.

Students engage with a variety of texts for enjoyment. They listen to, read, view, interpret, evaluate, and perform a range of spoken, written and multimodal texts in which the primary purpose is aesthetic, as well as texts designed to inform and persuade. These include various types of media texts including newspapers, magazines and digital texts, early adolescent novels, non-fiction, poetry, and dramatic performances. Students develop their understanding of how texts, including media texts,
are influenced by context, purpose, and audience.

Literary texts that support and extend students in Years Seven as independent readers are drawn from a range of genres and involve some challenging and unpredictable plot sequences and a range of non-stereotypical characters. These texts explore themes of interpersonal relationships and ethical dilemmas within real-world and fictional settings and represent a variety of perspectives. Informative texts present technical and content information from various sources about specialised topics. Text structures are more complex including chapters, headings and subheadings, tables of contents, indexes, and glossaries. Language features include successive complex sentences with embedded clauses, unfamiliar technical vocabulary, figurative and rhetorical language, and information supported by various types of graphics. Students create a range of imaginative, informative, and
persuasive types of texts, and are beginning to create literary analysis and transformations of texts.

English as an Additional Language or Dialect (EAL/D) learners are those whose first language is a language or dialect other than Standard Australian English (SAE), which is the variety of spoken and written English used formally in Australian schools. While EAL/D learners bring with them a wealth of knowledge, understandings, and values from their own culture to a classroom, they require additional support to assist them to develop proficiency in SAE.

The EAL/D teaching, learning and assessment model shows how various building blocks interconnect to scaffold the language teaching process and to embed the students’ language development in SAE. With repeated practice, new learning becomes integrated and language development continues to progress as it becomes more complex.

The English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) Progress Map is the Western Australian planning, monitoring and assessment tool for all students requiring support in developing Standard Australian English (SAE) who come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds whether arriving from overseas or born in Australia, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

The purpose of the EAL/D Progress Map is to:

• describe student progress across listening, speaking, reading, and viewing and writing modes in four phases of schooling – early childhood, middle childhood, early adolescence, and late adolescence
• acknowledge the existing language skills and abilities of EAL/D students
• provide an effective and valid means of reporting EAL/D student proficiency in SAE. EAL/D progress Map – Secondary

In Year Seven, HASS consists of Civics and Citizenship, Economics and Business, Geography and History. Students develop increasing independence in critical thinking and skill application, which includes questioning, researching, analysing, evaluating, communicating, and reflecting. They apply these skills to investigate events, developments, issues, and phenomena, both historical and contemporary.

Students examine the key features of Australia’s democracy, and how it is shaped through the Australian Constitution and constitutional change. The concepts of justice, rights and responsibilities are further developed through a focus on Australia’s legal system.

The interdependence of consumers and producers in the market and the characteristics of successful businesses is a key focus area. Work and work futures are introduced, as students consider why people work. Students focus on national issues, with opportunities for the concepts to also be considered in relation to local community or global issues where appropriate.

The concepts of place, space, environment, interconnection, sustainability & change are developed as a way of thinking and provide students with the opportunity to inquire into the nature of water as a natural resource. The concept of place is expanded through an investigation of the liveability of their own place.

Students develop their historical understanding through key concepts, including evidence, continuity and change, cause and effect, perspectives, empathy, significance, and contestability. These concepts are investigated within the historical context of how we know about the ancient past, and why and where the earliest societies developed.

The proficiency strands understanding, fluency, problemsolving and reasoning are an integral part of mathematics content across the three content strands: number and algebra, measurement and geometry, and statistics and probability. The proficiencies reinforce the significance of working mathematically within the content and describe how the content is explored or developed. They provide the language to build in the developmental aspects of the learning of mathematics. The achievement standards reflect the content and encompass the proficiencies. Understanding includes describing patterns in uses of indices with whole numbers, recognising equivalences between fractions, decimals, percentages, and ratios, plotting points on the Cartesian plane, identifying angles formed by a transversal crossing a pair of lines, and connecting the laws and properties of numbers to algebraic terms and expressions.

Fluency includes calculating accurately with integers, representing fractions and decimals in various ways, investigating best buys, finding measures of central tendency, and calculating areas of shapes and volumes of prisms.

Problem-solving includes formulating and solving authentic problems using numbers and measurements, working with transformations, and identifying symmetry, calculating angles and interpreting sets of data collected through chance experiments.

Reasoning includes applying the number laws to calculations, applying known geometric facts to draw conclusions about shapes, applying an understanding of ratio and interpreting data displays.

In Year Seven, students explore the diversity of life on earth and develop their understanding of the role of classification in ordering and organising information. They use and develop models such as food chains, food webs and the water cycle to represent and analyse the flow of energy and matter through ecosystems and explore the impact of changing components within these systems.

They investigate and represent balanced and unbalanced forces acting on objects and relate changes in an object’s motion to its mass and the magnitude and direction of forces.

They explore processes of electricity generation from renewable and non-renewable resources and consider their impact on the planet.

They investigate relationships in the Earth-Sun-Moon system and use models to predict and explain events such as eclipses and tides. Students develop investigable questions, observation-based predictions, and hypotheses to explore scientific models.

They make accurate measurements and control variables to analyse relationships between system components. They explore and explain these relationships through appropriate representations and consider the role of science in decision making processes.

This course serves as an introduction to computer systems and networks using programming to create solutions to problems. As such, the course is accessible to anyone, regardless of their experience!

Students can expect to learn about the different aspects of systems and networks and how they work together. They will also learn how to represent and manipulate data using code, designing, and creating websites.

Further to this, students learn how to use the Microsoft software suite, and gain important abilities such as Touch Typing.

In Year Seven, the content expands students’ knowledge, understanding and skills to help them achieve successful outcomes in personal, social, movement and online situations. They learn how to take positive action to enhance their health, safety and wellbeing by applying problem-solving and effective communication skills, and through a range of preventive health practices.

Students continue to develop and refine specialised movement skills and focus on developing tactical thinking skills in a range of contexts and applying them to physical activities. They have opportunities to analyse their own and others’ performance using feedback to improve body control and coordination. They learn about health-related and skill-related components of fitness and the types of activities that improve individual aspects of fitness. The application of fair play and ethical behaviour continues to be a focus for students as they consider modified rules, scoring systems and equipment, which allows participants to enjoy physical activities and experience success. They begin to link activities and processes to the improvement of health and fitness.

The Health and Physical Education curriculum provides opportunities for students to develop, enhance and exhibit attitudes and values that promote a healthy lifestyle.