How to adapt our resources

At Ochre, we pride ourselves on creating lessons by teachers, for teachers. The teachers who have contributed to the work of Ochre have shared their considerable expertise and experience for the benefit of their colleagues and their students. These resources have been created to adhere to best practices in curriculum and lesson design.

We also know that every classroom, every student, and every context is different. We know that teachers know their students best, and have the knowledge to adjust lessons to best suit them. In order to help teachers in this adaptation, all of our materials are created in an adaptable, editable form for teachers to adjust. We encourage teachers to adapt our lessons to best suit their needs and practices.

The first step in adaptation of the resources to your context is to make your own copy. Copies can be made into your own Google Drive, or by downloading it in Microsoft formats.

Save a copy in your Google Drive:

Download a copy in a Microsoft format:

The short video below explains how to adapt our maths daily reviews, but the same principle applies to all our lessons.

Yes, you can change the order of the units. Our curriculum mapping resources such as the yearly overviews and the scope and sequences have been developed with a certain structure and schedule in mind, but they are guides rather than requirements.

In some subjects and for some units, the order of units is critical. The unit progression diagrams show where a particular unit needs to be taught before another unit. This progression is particularly important in our Maths and Science units.

There is some flexibility in the order that the English novel study units can be used in. Your school can move units around to suit your context and align with cross-curriculum areas and existing scope and sequences. However, there are a series of flow-on effects of adjusting the unit order that schools need to consider.

The daily review content is taught as per the Language and Literacy Skills Section scope and sequence for grammar, handwriting and spelling. The targets for each lesson’s daily review are taken from lessons scheduled for previous terms to review.

If you choose to move units around, consider the implications of the daily review. For example, if teaching a unit earlier than scheduled, there may be concept, words and skills that are present in the associated daily reviews that students have not yet had the opportunity to learn. In these cases, the untaught materials should either be hidden or deleted, and replaced with content that students are more familiar with.

Our handwriting, grammar, and reading/spelling and orthography resources follow a scope and sequence, building cumulatively across the course of terms and years.

Adjusting the order of units means that the Language and Literacy Skills Section of the curriculum will be taught out of sequence. It is possible that some parts of this section will need to be adjusted to take into account the lack of student prior knowledge.

Use the scope and sequence for each of those sections and make instructional decisions from there. For example, you might wish to keep the Language and Literacy Skills Section as per the unit sequences on the yearly overview, and just adjust the Literature Study component (where the novel is read and the sentence and text level writing learnt) to the preferred terms.

We have provided scope and sequence documents for each of the key skills in the Language and Literacy Skills section in order to inform some of these decisions. These can be found in the curriculum resources section of each novel study unit.

Sentence level writing: Moving this section around shouldn't be a problem as many of the targets are repeated across terms and year levels. You could review the sentence-level writing targets in each of the units as per the yearly overview, and if there are specific targets you feel are important to teach, you can use that part of the slide deck to explicitly teach the concept if required.

Text level writing: You can refer to the Yearly Overview (found in the curriculum resources section of each novel study unit) to see what genres are covered to help with your decisions, and ensure all genres are covered as per your school needs and context.