I thought I knew the Australian Curriculum for English almost inside out, but recently discovered a whole new box I had been leaving un-ticked.

It was the ScOT box.

What does ScOT stand for, you ask?

Schools Online Thesaurus.

If you go to their homepage (http://scot.curriculum.edu.au/) you can search for a relevant term to your field and see what you get. I searched for ‘literature’ and was directed to this:

Schools Online Thesaurus: http://scot.curriculum.edu.au/

…you can see some of the rabbit holes I’ve been down from there already.

I found such useful things in the thesaurus for the work I’m doing this week.

I also found the other data sets available in the Australian education vocabularies list:

Australian education vocabularies: http://vocabulary.curriculum.edu.au/

For the English teachers still playing along – see ‘language modes’ in the list? Kinda specific thing to make a vocabulary about, I thought.

I clicked though and interestingly, the entry does not reflect all six language modes in the Australian Curriculum.

‘Creating’ has been left out.

Australian education vocabularies – language modes: http://vocabulary.curriculum.edu.au/languageModes.html

Creating has been left out, despite being there plain as day in the Achievement Standards, the Aim, and the Glossary entry for ‘mode’ in English.

And there ends the list of all the things I needed to stop and show you.

Who I do I write to, to point this out?

Enjoy the thesaurus!