Curriculum Knowledge Overview

Our vision ‘excellent learning and friendship’, in collaboration with our school values, translates into a knowledge rich curriculum with the intent of closing the gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged. Our classrooms may be the only source of knowledge for the most vulnerable pupils and so we must guarantee knowledge through our ambitious curriculum whilst also supporting children with SEND in order to close the attainment gap.

The core subjects for all children involves knowledge-rich daily lessons in the building blocks of all education: reading, phonics/spelling, story-telling, handwriting, writing and mathematics. We value the pursuit of knowledge enabling every child to flourish. Due to our drive to provide the best possible learning opportunities for children, we use an approach called ‘Read Write Inc’ to support our phonics teaching, taking into account the children’s individual needs to ensure the teaching approach matches their requirements with the key knowledge at each stage. This works hand in hand with our Daily Supported Reader teaching and initiatives which allows children to implement their phonetic knowledge when reading books on a daily basis and analysing the information and structure as a means to transfer this knowledge into their own reading and writing.  This strategy is then evolved across Year 2 and into Key Stage Two, becoming underpinned by our own approach to teaching reading which we call RIME. This abbreviation outlines the areas we believe form the foundations of children’s comprehension knowledge: Retrieval, Inference, Misconception and Explanation. Within school, the love of reading is promoted through our ‘Reading for Pleasure’ incentive as well as other strategies such as visits from our wellbeing (reading and learning) dog ‘Dave’ who enjoys visiting the classrooms to have children share their learning with him. You can see how much we appreciate his visits in this video here:

Our intent for the wider curriculum can be summarised through the ‘5 Cs’:

• Creative – Maximising the opportunities for children to make, do, explore and create using newly acquired and pre-existing knowledge.
• Collaborative – Working together on class projects to share knowledge, teaching teamwork and independence and higher-level problem solving.
• Cross-curricular – Learning across subjects takes place to get the breadth of knowledge to allow a child to discover their own individual talent.
• Continuous Learning – The knowledge and understanding to be gained at each stage, allowing for this to provide a river of learning rather than separate pools of understanding.
• Child-centred – Pupil voice enables children to truly engage in the learning and develop thinking, questioning and independence in the acquisition of knowledge.

As the knowledge strengthens, we look to translate our curriculum framework into a structure, narrative and with subject specific pedagogy following a curriculum design review process (implementation) and evaluate what knowledge and understanding pupils have gained against expectations (impact).

Our curriculum is the progress model – if children are keeping up with the curriculum then they are making good progress.  Progress means knowing more and remembering more. Knowledge that has been learned and retained in long term memory is necessary for analysis, creativity etc.  We ask: has the child gained the knowledge to understand the key concepts and ideas? Is this enabling them to develop the skills they need to master?

We strive to make all learning personalized and support this with weekly home learning tasks to ensure the opportunities for children to extend their knowledge can be maximised; in turn, this keeps parents and carers informed of what children are completing in school. Furthermore, we look to extend children’s understanding of our values through opportunities to learn about their world and become an active member of the school as Peer Mediators, Eco warriors, School Ambassadors and Sports leaders.

If you require details of our curriculum please look below for our schemes of work. We strive to hold regular information sessions for parents/carers; please look at our events pages.