A Typical School Day
Children at Village are engaged in learning throughout the day, in a wide variety of ways.
A typical day at Village School has much in common with other primary schools, and yet there are also some key differences. Children are engaged in learning activities throughout the day and interact with staff and other students as required.
But there’s a lot more variation in the individual activities, in the nature of the interactions, and the general rhythm of the school. A casual observer of a typical day at Village School might see students moving around the classroom, engaged in various activities, or moving around the school grounds, interacting with staff, students and animals.
Learning takes place in all these activities, not just in the classroom. Real life tasks have real life outcomes. For instance, if you’ve tethered your pony too close to another the tethers will entangle and you’ll need to go back, untangle the ropes and move your pony to an emptier space. Hopefully the next time you do that task you remember and modify your behaviour.
A typical day at Village
Here’s a breakdown of a typical day at Village School.
8:30 am - Students and teachers begin arriving at school
8:45 am - Higher year students complete farm duties or do quiet reading
9:00 am - Home group meeting
9:15 am - Learning
11:00 am - Recess / break
11:30 am - Learning
1:00 pm - Lunch – Students usually spend lunch playing with friends, building cubby houses or playing games.
2:00 pm - Learning
3:00 pm - Farm duties, followed by classroom jobs
3:30 pm - End of school: After learning is finished and chores are complete, students collect their bags and spill out into the school grounds to meet up with parents and play with friends.
After school some students head for the corral for extra pony riding lessons, others might go to a kids’ yoga session or music lesson in the hall.
The time after school is often just a social time for parents and kids. We find that parents tend to hang around more after school, because it’s such a small community and we don’t all live in the surrounding area, so lots of play dates are arranged at this time.
Special lessons
Apart from the standard in-classroom activities and typical days, there are sessions and days when students reorganise and rotate through various specialised activities.
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As part of our sports curriculum, students rotate through a number of sport activities one afternoon a week, participating in things like horse riding lessons, gymnastics, swimming and tennis
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At various times, our students may also be heading off for an excursion or participating in an incursion, to learn more about their world and their local community.
We may also call students out of class to join in on school-wide or ad hoc activities, including meetings, practice for school performance and school projects.
Homework
We aim to instil a love of learning and keep homework to a minimum. We take a different approach from many schools when it comes to homework. Although students may complete schoolwork at home, it is not a necessary part of their schooling, and we aim instead for it to be a natural extension of a child’s curiosity and love of learning.
Our approach to homework
We believe that play is an important part of the learning process, and that childhood should allow plenty of time for exploration and self-directed learning. This philosophy extends to our approach to homework, which is to minimise the amount of work that we send home with students. So although we are not a fully “no homework” school, our students bring home significantly less schoolwork than your average primary school.
Teachers may on occasion provide tasks for extra practice or to reinforce classroom learning, such as troublesome spelling words or key maths skills, but the level is kept low. This also means that the demands on busy parents are minimal, although we encourage practising English and maths skills with children in the course of everyday activities. Teachers may also provide access to online learning platforms that students can use from home, to further reinforce concepts and skills learned at school.
We also aim to instil a love of learning in our students and expect that this will spill over into their home time activities, where they may choose to continue with projects from school or initiate learning about a topic or skill of interest.
Do primary school students need homework?
There has been much debate over the years about the value of homework, especially for primary school students.
With parents reporting high stress levels for themselves and their children as a result of the demands placed on them by homework, it’s important that we ensure that all work sent home provides sufficient value to warrant it.
And Finland’s recent academic revolution, where it moved to the top of the world for reading, maths and science, based on a program that has minimal tests, no rankings, plenty of time for play and minimal homework, suggests that sometimes enough is enough.
The Victorian Department of Education website also quotes a recent study that shows that the quality of homework is more important than quantity and can be made more effective by providing students with more choices over the work they do.
Our relaxed approach to homework is in line with these experiences around the world, by keeping homework to minimal levels, relevant to in-school learning and self-managed by students.
Examples of homework
Keeping in mind our general approach to homework, here are some examples of situations that might generate homework and the types of work that you might see coming home with your child.
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A teacher may notice certain words that a student is struggling with and send home a list of words along with a long list of varied and fun activities that students can use to practice their spelling.
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Children might be interviewing their parents about their opinions, or their memories and writing their comments.
They might just have turned their creative writing task into a chapter book and want to continue it at home.
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Chanting tables both at home and in the car are regularly recommended. Sometimes a child hasn’t completed the maths task for that week and may be asked to finish it off at home.
At other times a maths theme might involve measuring your family, making a drawing of your house or collecting information about percentages from the tins or products in your family’s pantry.
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Our students take on “passion projects” from time to time, where they choose a subject matter that they’re especially interested in and complete a project, in the form of their choosing, on that topic.
This activity may spill over into home learning, simply because the student is highly engaged with the exercise and wants to keep working on it at home.
Student Reports
Our holistic approach to learning means that reports and grades play a different role at Village School. Although we provide written reports and parent-teacher interviews twice a year, our focus is more on the individual development and achievements of each child. We also provide regular progress updates and feedback to students and parents, as part of the day-to-day learning process.
Our Reports
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The most valuable feedback we can provide is on a day-to-day basis to children as they are learning and exploring a subject. By gently guiding them, asking them questions about their work and helping them to reflect on what they have done and understood, we help students develop a deeper appreciation for the material. We also approach mistakes as an opportunity to learn and develop resilience, rather than a reason for concern or censure.
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Twice a year parents have the opportunity to attend a formal parent-teacher interview, where they can discuss their child’s progress and raise any concerns or areas for focus. Parents are also welcome to organise a meeting with their child’s teacher at any time to discuss how they’re going, or to address challenges that have arisen.
Teachers are also available by email, which allows parents to share insights, updates or information that may help our teachers support your child more effectively in the classroom.
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Teachers write formal reports for your child twice a year, offering insights on how your child is progressing both academically and socially. We address our comments directly to your child, as a sign of respect and with the understanding that our feedback is of most value to our students, to help them reflect on their learning journey and grow.
Our reports provide constructive feedback, recognition of achievements, suggestions for skills to further develop and encouragement for the future. We may also provide a general indication to you whether your child’s skills are at, above or below the expected level for each of the curriculum areas, but prefer to keep a minimal focus on this type of reporting.
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As part of our individualised and democratic approach to education, we refrain from applying grades to our students’ work. Instead, we use teaching strategies to help students reflect on their work, to identify what achievements they are satisfied with and which aspects they would like to improve on.
We have an obligation to run NAPLAN tests for students in years 3 and 5 but many of our parents exercise the right to exempt their children from these tests for philosophical reasons.