Our Curriculum
Intent
Our curriculum has been designed to cover all of the skills, knowledge and understanding as set out in the National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Statutory Framework. We then enhance these by ensuring that it relates to our locality and the heritage of our pupils. In addition, we enrich learning through providing a range of opportunities, visits, visitors and experiences that build meaningful and real-life learning. To ensure that pupils develop secure skills, knowledge, and understanding that they can build on, our curriculum is organised into a progression model that outlines the knowledge, vocabulary and skills to be taught in a sequentially coherent way in each year group. All aspects of the curriculum are carefully mapped out so that children can make meaningful links between subjects and to strengthen connections and understanding for children, enabling them to know more and remember more.
At Creswell C of E Infant and Nursery school we encourage children to become independent learners by asking and answering their own questions, challenging themselves and to reflect on their own learning and making improvements. We also encourage them to be resilient learners by taking risks and making mistakes, accepting that this is part of their learning journey. We ensure that children have the opportunity to apply skills and knowledge independently in a range of contexts.
We will share our curriculum plans termly through curriculum letters which will enable you to discuss and support your child's learning at home. These plans are flexible to allow us to respond to children's interests and the changing world around us. Your child's class teacher will be happy to discuss the plans further with you. Curriculum letters are available on the school website on the curriculum page.
Implementation
All learning will begin by revisiting prior knowledge. This will be scaffolded to support children to recall previous learning and make connections. Staff will model explicitly the subject specific knowledge, vocabulary and skills relevant to the learning to allow pupils to integrate new knowledge into larger concepts.
Teachers support children to practice new learning, questioning for understanding, checking for misconceptions and giving clear and appropriate feedback. This moves children from supported practice to independence at the correct pace for them, ensuring all children are challenged. Learning will be supported through the use of working walls that provide children with scaffolding that supports them to retain new facts and vocabulary in their long-term memory. Display spaces in class and around school will display subject work from early years to the end of KS1, highlighting the curriculum content and concepts that are developed over time.
Weekly sharing of class learning and curriculum quizzes are used to review learning and check that children know more and remember more. Learning is reviewed, after a period of forgetting, so that teachers can check whether information has been retained. Assessment is ongoing throughout the relevant cross-curricular themes to inform teachers with their lesson planning, activities and differentiation. Our children will be given a variety of experiences both in and out of the classroom, where appropriate, to create memorable learning opportunities and to further support and develop their understanding and language acquisition. Individual subject curriculum statements provide further detail and can be found on the school website on the curriculum page.
Impact
At Creswell C of E Infant and Nursery school, the impact of our curriculum is shown in several ways. In core subjects, impact is shown through the progress and outcomes of pupils in line with national assessment and reporting requirements. In addition, pupil voice and the quality of work in pupils’ books demonstrates the deeper impact on pupils knowing and remembering more. In the wider curriculum, pupil voice shows that pupils are confident and able to talk about what they have learnt using subject specific vocabulary. Pupil voice also demonstrates that pupils enjoy and are able to recall their learning over time. Pupils’ work demonstrates that the curriculum is taught at an age appropriate standard across each year group with opportunities planned in for pupils working at greater depth. Work across the curriculum is of good quality and demonstrates that pupils are acquiring knowledge, skills and vocabulary in an appropriate sequence so that they know more and remember more.
At Creswell C of E Infant and Nursery School, we recognise that children learn best when curriculum subjects are taught consistently well across the school. To support staff, including supply staff and those that are new to school, each subject leader has developed a 'Teaching on a page' document which provides everything they would need to know on one page.
We also hope these documents will support parents/carers to understand more about their child's learning.