2025: Beneath Our Feet

Focus of the Year: Beneath Our Feet

Each year at The Rainforest School, we choose a whole-school theme to bring learning to life across subjects. Our 2025 focus, Beneath Our Feet, invites students to explore the rich, complex, and ever-changing world beneath the surface — connecting science, history, culture and the arts in meaningful ways.

With support from the Queensland Government’s Engaging Science Grant, our Beneath Our Feet project is a deep dive into the natural processes and human stories that shape the landscapes we live on. Students investigate soils, rocks, minerals, fossils and landforms — how they came to be, how they change over time, and how people interact with and care for them.

Hands-On Learning in Context

To anchor our learning in the local landscape, we’ve welcomed a wide range of visiting experts to our classrooms and ventured out into the region ourselves.

So far this year, students have:

• Met with a paleontologist, archaeologist, and anthropologist to understand different ways of uncovering the past
• Worked alongside Djiru Traditional Custodians to learn about local knowledge of Country and connection to land
• Engaged with the Cassowary Coast Regional Council to examine waterways, human impact, soil health and composting
• Learned about recycling systems and sustainable practices with EnviroCom Australia
• Taken excursions to Fruit Forest Farm, Crystal Caves, and a school camp to Undara and the Atherton Tablelands to explore geological formations, volcanic history, and land use

Cross-Curricular Connections

In Science and HASS, students have investigated soil types and quality, rock formations, volcanoes, fossils, and climate impacts on the environment.

In English, students have written information reports and persuasive pieces, and even created their own interactive quizzes based on their field experiences.

In The Arts, every student designed and sculpted their own clay pottery piece inspired by the textures and colours of the earth. These are now proudly on display at Mission Arts Gallery.

Purposeful Learning

Through Beneath Our Feet, students are developing a deeper awareness of the natural world and our role in looking after it. They’re asking big questions: How did our landscape come to be? What stories lie under the ground we walk on? How can we be good caretakers of the land that sustains us?

By embedding our learning in local places, people and practices, this project fosters curiosity, responsibility and wonder—core to our values of community, connection, conservation and creativity.