Skills and the curriculum

A skill is one small thing your student can learn and show they can do - "add fractions with different denominators", "write a topic sentence", "explain a cause of an event". Each is small enough to teach in a few minutes and to check with a handful of questions.

Everything in Masterly hangs off skills. Lessons teach one. Practice and reviews test one. Homework questions are matched to the skills they use, so a worksheet counts as evidence too. Mastery is tracked per skill, not per worksheet.

The skills follow the Australian Curriculum (version 9), from Foundation to Year 10, across all eight learning areas - about 1,300 skills in all. The curriculum itself describes what students learn in fairly dense, formal language; we split it into teachable skills and give each one a plain-English title, a short explanation for you and for your student, and a worked example.

The original curriculum wording is still there - open Curriculum details on any skill - so you can match it against a school report or a unit outline.

Maths and English are the core. They build on themselves year after year - a gap in fractions or paragraph writing keeps costing marks for years - so they're what we suggest on our own when your student's plan needs something new.

The other learning areas - Science, Humanities (history, geography, civics, economics), Health and PE, Technologies, the Arts and Languages - are all there too, in beta. They usually come in through schoolwork: when you add a science worksheet, its questions are matched to science skills and your student's answers count towards them. You can also add any skill from any subject to the plan yourself and we'll teach it. Lessons for these subjects are newer and less reviewed than Maths and English, so they're marked Beta when you browse skills.

Maths, English and Science are set out year by year (Foundation, Year 1, Year 2…). The other subjects are set out in two-year bands, like Years 7–8, the same way the curriculum does it. A banded skill belongs to both years in its band.

Your student's year level decides where we start, but it isn't a ceiling or a floor. You can add skills from earlier years to fill a gap, or from later years to stretch ahead.

Many skills build on earlier ones - you need multiplication before long division. We won't teach a skill until its prerequisites are mastered, so your student is never thrown into something they can't do yet.

Prerequisites from earlier years are assumed covered at school. A Year 8 student isn't held back waiting to prove Year 7 skills; only prerequisites from their own year or later have to be learnt first, and if one isn't in the plan we teach it as groundwork. If a homework answer shows an older gap, we'll pick it up then.

Your student's plan is the set of skills they're working on. Skills get there four ways:

Two pages, two jobs. Skills shows your student: what's in their plan, where each skill is up to, and what we'd suggest next. You can take a skill out of the plan from there. Curriculum shows everything in the curriculum, whether your student has touched it or not, and is where you add new skills.

On both, each skill shows where your student is up to: Not started, In progress, Mastered, Needs review (due a quick check) or Regressed (a mastered skill that slipped, and is being brought back).

Many English and humanities skills turn on one verb - identify, describe, explain, analyse, evaluate. They sound alike but ask for quite different answers, and losing marks for describing when the question said explain is one of the most common problems in high school. Each skill shows its verb, and there's a guide to what each one asks for.