The Primary (K-3) Curriculum
B.C. Curriculum:
The BC Curriculum provides flexibility to allow educators to personalize learning and address the diverse needs and interests of their students. We create safe, purposeful, and powerful learning environments where all students can think critically, create, collaborate, contribute, and learn.
Core Competencies:
The Core Competencies are central to BC's curriculum redesign. Students develop these intellectual, personal, and social and emotional proficiencies through doing. By fostering the development of the Core Competencies, educators help students engage in deeper thinking.
Thinking
- Creative Thinking
- Critical Thinking
Communication
Personal and Social
- Positive Personal/Cultural Identity
- Personal Awareness and Responsibility
- Social Awareness and Responsibility
Literacy and Numeracy:
Educators foster strong foundations in literacy and numeracy through joyful, play-based experiences across all subject areas. We build confidence and competence in children while supporting their sense of pride in language and culture. Children are given time and space to develop skills in a variety of ways. Literacy is the ability to understand, critically analyze, and create a variety of forms of communication, including oral, written, visual, digital, and multimedia, in order to accomplish one's goal (Ministry of Education, 2023). Numeracy is the ability to understand and apply mathematical concepts, processes, and skills to solve problems in a variety of contexts (Ministry of Education, 2023).
The First Peoples Principles of Learning (FNESC, 2012) are woven into our literacy and numeracy teaching practices and approaches.
The principles are:
- Learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors.
- Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational (focused on connectedness, on reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place).
- Learning involves recognizing the consequences of one's actions.
- Learning involves generational roles and responsibilities.
- Learning recognizes the role of Indigenous knowledge.
- Learning is embedded in memory, history, and story.
- Learning involves patience and time.
- Learning requires exploration of one's identity.
- Learning involves recognizing that some knowledge is sacred and only shared with permission and/or in certain situations.
English Language Arts:
Our goal is for children to see themselves as speakers, listeners, readers, writers, and thinkers. We engage children in dynamic and flexible learning. Children are given choices within their work and are the authors of their learning story. Children grow to understand that everyone has a unique story to share. Children learn to listen to the stories of others and appreciate different perspectives. We believe in an integrated and holistic approach.
We focus on these Language Arts curricular goals to foster childrens' development as educated citizens (Ministry of Education, 2023):
- Become proficient and knowledgeable language users
- Appreciate language and learning as sources of joy, curiosity, and passion
- Think creatively, critically, and reflectively
- Recognize technology as literacy tools
- Strengthen understanding of self, others, and the world
- Develop an understanding of the knowledge and perspectives of First Peoples
- Appreciate the power, beauty, and artistry of language and texts
- Use language to design and share information
Here are the language arts concepts from the BC Curriculum that K-3 students explore throughout their primary years:
- Language and story can be a source of creativity and joy
- Playing with language helps us discover how language works
Throughout the primary years, children build on and explore the following interconnected Language Arts elements (Ministry of Education, 2023):
Reading, Listening and Viewing
- Engage actively as listeners, viewers, and readers
- Develop reading, listening, and viewing strategies
- Explore a variety of diverse forms of text
- Recognize the structure of a story
- Work towards reading fluency
- Explore stories and identity
- Use prior knowledge to make meaning
- Understand how story in First Peoples cultures connects people to family, community, and land
Writing, Speaking, and Representing
- Use language to identify, create, and share ideas, feelings, opinions, and preferences
- Explore oral storytelling and appreciate aspects of First Peoples oral traditions
- Exchange ideas and perspectives to build shared understanding
- Identify, organize, and present ideas in a variety of forms
- Plan and create stories and a variety of communication forms
- Create stories and texts to deepen awareness of self, family, and community
- Understand and apply conventions of spelling, grammar, and punctuation
Mathematics:
Our goal is for children to become confident, competent mathematicians. Math is not simply about memorizing facts and formulas, but rather, math is about understanding how numbers can be broken apart and put back together in different ways. During math, children engage in combining, joining, separating, comparing, and grouping. Skilled mathematicians observe, take risks, make mistakes, ask questions, investigate, revise, consider alternatives, and persevere. We want children to identify as mathematicians and feel joy and excitement when engaging in math activities at school. It is our aim to help children develop a math lens so they can see math in the world around them and engage in playful, relevant, and meaningful math, daily. We believe that it is important to make math approachable for children and to create access points for all children to participate and explore the concepts. Therefore, math instruction happening in our schools today may look quite different than what parents and caregivers experienced in their own education.
We focus on these Mathematics curricular goals to foster childrens' development as numerate citizens having mathematical mindsets (Ministry of Education, 2023):
- Develop a deep understanding of facts and processes to solve complex problems
- Reason using number, pattern, spatial relationships, and data
- Become financially literate
- Use flexible, effective, and personalized strategies for analyzing and problem-solving
- Explore connections between math and other ways of knowing, such as First Peoples knowledge and other worldviews
- Develop perseverance and confidence
- View and navigate the world with a mathematical mindset
- Develop abstract and critical thinking skills
Here are the math concepts from the BC Curriculum that K-3 students explore throughout their primary years:
- Numbers
- Computational fluency
- Patterning
- Geometry and measurement
- Data and probability
We work to build mathematical competence (Carole Fullerton, 2022) in children:
Conceptual Understanding
- Big ideas
Procedural Fluency
- Skills
Strategic Competence
- Strategies
Adaptive Reasoning
- Knowing what strategy to use, when
Productive Dispositions
- Building
- Modelling
- Listening to others
- Solving problems and representing concepts in multiple and unique ways
- Making thinking visible
We use good questions before, during, and after math exploration to prompt children's mathematical thinking:
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After
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