August is the perfect time to explore what Scootle has to offer to help you engage your students in literature and literacy. With Children’s Book Week being celebrated from 16th-23rd August and Literacy and Numeracy Week from 29th August – September 4th, Scootle has you covered!

These activities invite students to explore storytelling and the processes of imagination and connection through tools that span the curriculum.

Building blocks of narrative

• Creating a ‘Choose your own Adventure’ story is an excellent way for Year 3-6 students to design and implement a Digital Technologies project that makes use of branching. (Digital Technologies Hub)
• The 2025 Book Week theme is ‘Book an Adventure!’ Explore the conventions of Adventure Stories with Year 7-8 students, including possible scenarios, how to plot the story and examples of descriptive writing techniques. (Brett Lamb)

Making meaning – connecting with authors and texts

• Foundation-Year 6 students will enjoy examining and responding to The Truck Cat, written by Deborah Frankel and illustrated by Danny Snell and shortlisted for Picture Book of the Year.  (Reading Australia)

• Best-selling Australian authors Aaron Blabey (‘Bad Guys’ series) and  Andy Griffiths (‘Treehouse’ series) will inspire primary school writers, as they answer students’ questions about their early lives and their inspirations for writing. (Squiz Kids Q+A)

Craft and creative process

• What techniques do storytellers use to create characters? Year 3-6 students can create character sketches, after analysing how a character’s personality traits, actions and motives influence the plot of a story. Setting is also a significant element in fiction. Teach Year 7-10 students to use elements of mood and spatial order as methods of creating realistic settings in short stories. (Kennedy Centre)
• Explore the features and context of interactive fiction (IF) with Year 9-10 students through the unit Teaching with Videogames: Creative writing using Twine. Students will explore second person narrative perspective and plan, develop, build and review their own playable interactive fictions using open source Twine software. (ACMI)

These English resources can all be found in the Book Week/Literacy and Numeracy Week 2025 Learning Path.

New resources are regularly being added to the Scootle collection. Log in to see the latest free, curriculum-aligned resources for Australian educators. 

Educators are constantly seeking effective tools to enhance the learning experience for their students. One free online tool is Scootle’s learning paths, an easy way to build lists of resources and create structured progressions towards learning outcomes.  Here’s a simple guide on how to create a learning path in Scootle. 

Step 1: Define your goals 

Before creating a learning path, clearly define your educational goals. What are the key learning outcomes you want to achieve? Which aspects of the curriculum are you addressing? Having a clear set of objectives will guide your search for resources and the structure of your learning path. 

Step 2: Log in and set up 

Ensure you have access to Scootle by logging in with your credentials. All Australian educators are entitled to a free account; you can find out more about creating one in our blog article.  

Step 3: Search for resources 

Use Scootle’s search function to find resources. You can filter results by learning area, year level, resource type, and alignment with specific curriculum outcomes. For an engaging learning path, look for a variety of materials such as interactive activities, videos, lesson plans and quizzes that fit your educational goals. 

Step 4: Create your learning path 

Navigate to the first resource you’d like to add to your learning path. Click ‘Add to’, and a dropdown menu will show an option to create a new learning path. Fill in the name and description fields, and click ‘Add to learning path’ to add the resource. Repeat with each new resource, adding to the learning path you just created.   

Step 5: Select and organise resources 

Once you’ve found suitable resources, drag and drop them to reorder the learning path to create a coherent and logical sequence, which will help students build knowledge and skills systematically. Think about the progression of learning: start with introductory materials, move through to exploration and practice, and finish with assessment and reflection activities. 

 Step 6: Personalise your learning path for your audience 

You can edit the descriptive text that has been automatically imported with the resources and replace it with your own text, for example, questions for students or context from previous lessons. You can also add comments between items using the ‘Actions’ dropdown to further customise the learning path.  

Step 7: Share with your class and other educators 

Students can access a learning path anywhere and anytime, using a unique PIN and without the need for logins. You can find and share this pin by navigating to ‘My learning paths’ and opening the one you’d like to share. Students can then access your learning path using the url and PIN available on that page.  

A learning path can also be exported in a number of formats for use as a student worksheet, checklist of activities or assessment task.  

As you create and share your own learning paths through Scootle, you’ll be contributing to a growing, searchable bank of resources that all Australian educators can use. Search shared learning paths created by other educators to save time and benefit from the collective expertise of your peers. This collaborative approach enriches the portal, making Scootle an invaluable resource of curriculum-aligned learning paths built by teachers, for teachers.