Curriculum
At West St Leonards Primary Academy, our curriculum is created with every pupil in mind. Whatever your child’s talent and interest, our excellent teaching and learning aims to capture their interest and create curious learners whose individual needs are met in our creative classrooms.
Every day, all our learners experience rich daily lessons in the building blocks of all education: reading, phonics, spelling, storytelling, handwriting, writing and mathematics.
Our approach to teaching reading is underpinned by an approach called ‘Read Write Inc’ to support our phonics teaching as our youngest learners take their first steps on their reading journey. Daily reading incentives and supporting an early love of books, with a little help from Dave the Reading Dog, form the building blocks of our approach in the earliest years of learning.
From Year 2, and all through key stage 2, pupils evolve into our own reading programme, called RIME (Retrieval, Inference, Misconception and Explanation). This programme has been created to help our older children progress on their reading journey and develop the skills they need in comprehension and vocabulary to really grow as readers.
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.