What Your Child Is Expected to Learn This Year

Of all the jobs a homeschooling parent takes on, curriculum designer can feel the most daunting. You open the official syllabus for your child's year and find pages of outcomes, codes and strands, written for teachers and education departments. Where do you even start?

What most parents want is simpler: what is my child expected to learn this year, in each subject, and what could we do at home to get there?

That's the question Year at a Glance is built to answer.

The syllabus, translated into kitchen-table language

Year at a Glance takes the government curriculum and translates it into plain language, one year level and one subject at a time. There is a version for every year from Foundation to Year 10.

For each subject you get:

• An overview of the year: what your child will be working towards, in a paragraph you can read in a minute.
• The main areas within the subject, each with a clear description of what a child should be able to do by the end of the year.
• Ideas to try at home: named activities, each with a sample question or prompt you can use at the kitchen table.

What it looks like: English, Year 2

Here is how English for Year 2 is set out. The overview begins:

"This year, your child will continue to build on their literacy skills, becoming more sophisticated readers, writers, and communicators…"

Then English is broken into five areas, with names a child would enjoy:

• Talking and sharing
• Reading detective
• Writing workshop
• Story and poem time
• Sound and spelling lab

Open one, say Talking and sharing, and it explains what a child should be able to do by the end of the year: listening actively, taking turns, expressing and responding to opinions, and giving a short talk to a familiar audience. Then come the activities, each with something you can say out loud:

• Match your manners: practise speaking differently to different people. "How would you ask a friend for a pencil? How would you ask a teacher? How would you ask a stranger?"
• Group chat: during family conversations, encourage listening and turn-taking. "Your sister just shared her opinion. Can you respond to what she said?"
• Give a presentation: ask them to prepare a short talk about something they're interested in. "Can you tell us three facts about your favourite animal?"

None of it asks you to buy anything or follow a script. It tells you what the year is about and gives you ways to practise it in ordinary life.

How to use it

• Plan the year. Read each subject's overview and areas, then split them across terms in whatever order suits your family.
• Check your week against it. Look at what you've logged and see which areas the year expects that you haven't touched.
• Borrow the prompts. The sample questions are good conversation starters, even on a day when you have no plan.

You still choose how to teach it. The guide just means you never have to guess what the map looks like.

Free version, and the version inside the app

There are two versions of Year at a Glance, and the difference is the curriculum codes.

The free guide is written in plain language and draws on the Australian Curriculum and the NSW and Victorian curricula to describe what's typically covered. It doesn't list specific curriculum codes, because it isn't tied to your state.

Inside Homeschool-HQ, Year at a Glance is built for your child's year level and your registered state. Under each learning area it lists the activities you can log that count toward a code in your state's curriculum, with the code beside each one. So you can see what the year expects, the everyday activity that covers it, and the code it will be recorded against, all on one page.

In both versions, Year at a Glance is a guide to what to expect, not a record of what you've done. Your dated, code-matched record is built from the lessons you log, and that is what the Learning Summary is made from.

Get your year level, free

You can get the full guide for your child's year level for free. Pick the year, enter your email, and we'll send you the PDF, with every subject set out the same way as the English example above. Two short emails follow to help you put it to work, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Get your free Year at a Glance

If you'd like the version with your state's codes, alongside a place to log lessons and watch your week and your curriculum coverage fill in, you can get started with Homeschool-HQ here.