Curriculum
Woodston Whole School Curriculum
Intent:
At Woodston Primary School, we passionately believe that our children have the right to a broad and balanced curriculum.
Our engaging and inspirational curriculum underpins all the learning that takes place and fosters curiosity and a passion for learning so that children may develop into life-long learners. Our curriculum is built on strong pedagogical principles, with every child encouraged to meet and achieve their potential. We use key concepts through our curriculum that are built on throughout each year group.
It exposes our children to enriching experiences, immersing them in progressive knowledge and skills; equipping them with personal characteristics required to succeed in life. We want our children to have high aspirations for the future and know that these can be reached through hard work and determination.
Our curriculum is carefully designed, ensuring our children develop their academic, social and cultural capital. We encourage our children to celebrate success and learn from mistakes in order to develop resilience.
Implementation:
Our curriculum has been carefully designed and the learning opportunities for each phase ensure progression and repetition to embedding key learning, knowledge and skills.
Staff develop year group specific long-term curriculum maps which identify when the different subjects and topics will be taught across the academic year. Lessons are taught discretely, with staff making meaningful links across subjects to deepen children’s knowledge and understanding where appropriate.
Like all schools, our curriculum has developed over time; taking account of the changing needs of our pupils, legislation and academic research.
Our research highlighted the following:
- Progress means knowing more and remembering more.
- Prior knowledge allows learning of new content.
- We must consider how effectively we have selected a curriculum with:
- ‘powerful’ knowledge
- ‘transferable’ knowledge
- Carefully ’sequenced’ knowledge
This research led us to undertake further work on our curriculum when we worked as a staff to define the key concepts we wanted each child to learn, to set it in the broader context of a sequence of learning and to create opportunities for children to transfer this knowledge to learn new things and to deepen their understanding.
Impact:
We use both formative and summative assessment information every day, in every lesson, from careful interleaving and frequent retrieval. Staff use this information to inform their short-term planning and short-term interventions. This helps us provide the best possible support for all of our pupils, including the more able.
For many years, we have worked hard to foster a love of reading. Reading is at the heart of our school and one of our strengths. Following the ‘Power of Reading’ from CLPE (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education) approach deepens this love of reading. For this reason, you will find additional information and guidance on how we develop children’s reading ability and how we foster their love of reading. In Key Stage One we use Little Wandle as our phonics scheme, and use a range of reading books, where families can enjoy reading books online or with a physical copy.
Please use the tabs in this area of our website to find out more about our Curriculum.