Curriculum
Our Curriculum Aim:
To create and develop a Courageous and Contagious Curriculum.
Our Curriculum Statement:
To create opportunities which encourage curiosity and creativity in all children; which provides an inspiring, motivating curriculum with rich experiences and opportunities to extend children’s world; which develops life-long skills and a love of learning. We encourage everyone to become resilient, independent and confident young people, determined to do their best and to make a positive contribution to the community.
What is a Contagious and Courageous curriculum?
Courageous - is about being brave and not being afraid to make mistakes. We won’t narrow the learning opportunities for our pupils to solely Maths and English or ‘teach to the tests’. We want to develop resilience in all our pupils so that they are confident to take risks and learn from their mistakes.
Contagious - is all our pupils ‘catching learning’. We are developing a curriculum which is exciting and motivating, providing pupils with opportunities outside of those presented to them in their daily lives. We want pupils to be enthused by the learning journey, keen to ask questions and share their thoughts and ideas with others.
Curriculum Drivers
Our curriculum is designed for the needs of our pupils and aims to ensure that we are broadening the horizons and extending the boundaries of their lives.
We have identified elements that are integral to our aims and which will further enhance the exciting and engaging learning opportunities that pupils enjoy every day. These are our Curriculum Drivers:
Global Citizenship
Our pupils need to know about and understand the world beyond their immediate experience. They need to have opportunities to learn about a range of cultures and experiences; develop an awareness of environmental issues and understand their place in the 21st Century world.
Creativity
We want our pupils to engage and express their ideas in a variety of creative forms. Through teaching creative approaches, we will give the children opportunities to be imaginative, use experiences and observations to make connections in the learning and appreciate that learning can be accomplished in different forms.
Communication
We want our children to speak with confidence, articulation and fluency in a range of situations. We believe that giving our pupils a voice is vital and will work to broaden and enrich their vocabulary, encouraging talk in all areas of learning. Our pupils will also be confident readers and writers.
Curiosity
It is vital that we nurture the natural curiosity of our pupils, enabling them to become independent in thought and action. We will encourage them to imagine, enquire and become increasingly enterprising. We will give pupils opportunities to ask questions, think critically, solve problems and make choices.
Emotional Awareness
Our curriculum provides opportunities for children to learn to respect and appreciate the diversity of an ever-changing society. We will nurture confident, independent children who are able to make responsible choices, understand and maintain positive relationships and have the ability to show empathy and compassion to others.
Possibilities
Children can not aspire to things they have never encountered. We will work to broaden our children’s horizons, expanding their knowledge of the world and encourage fearlessness of what is new or unknown.
Design, creation and delivery of OUR curriculum
Our curriculum is designed and developed around, and is specifically for, OUR children. It creates new opportunities and experiences for our children which they would not normally encounter.
Every unit has a WOW experience planned which motivates and inspires our children. We passionately believe that these WOW experiences should be included to light each child’s fire, to make a spark of interest which will lead to more motivated learning and therefore a deeper understanding.
We firmly believe that external visits, internal experiences or visitors, and WOW moments can enhance learning because they facilitate opportunities and learning experiences that cannot happen within a classroom setting. Through these experiences the children begin to make links and experience abstract topics in real life contexts, they become excited and motivated about their learning, building memories that the children will hold for the rest of their lives.
The school uses the growth mind-set approach where everyone can achieve and is just not there YET. We value everyone’s unique talents and promote that we are all on a learning journey, which is not a race, but a journey of discovery and full of mistakes, where each mistake helps us to learn.
As the children move though the school, they develop the skills to think critically and problem solve in situations and are encouraged to ask questions and discuss responses to develop their self confidence in making their own decisions based on our school values. As a school in an area where Prevent and radicalisation is a real threat within the community, we must provide our children with the key skills to be able to think for themselves and not be influenced easily.
Knowledge rich
Our curriculum is designed to help children to accumulate a wealth of vocabulary, concepts, ideas and processes in addition to knowledge of people, events and places. It is not just a collection of discrete facts but a deep body of knowledge and understanding that provides substance.
The accumulation of knowledge and understanding in this way creates interconnected webs which enable our learners to confidently tackle new ideas and concepts. This makes new learning meaningful and ensures continued learning success in all areas and excellent progress is made year on year.
Linking our curriculum together
We aim to make strong links throughout our curriculum, as by doing this our children will be able to see the relevance of the curriculum in their own lives and relate to aspects of it as it unfolds.
Our School Values and Curriculum Drivers are both at the heart of our curriculum and feed into all aspects of school life, these lead to curricular opportunities and experiences which then in turn develop life skills.
This linking up will ensure our children are making strong brain connections, developing their understanding further and making their experiences more concrete.
Our Courageous and Contagious Curriculum
Our curriculum design holds at its heart OUR children and the moral imperative that our children encounter and acquire knowledge and experiences to make them well-rounded individuals and opens up the world for them. We want them to be able to be ready to access their next stage of learning and we believe that a wide and well-structured curriculum where our children can build their resilience and confidence is what they need. We want them to become responsible and successful members of the community, who then in turn can make a positive impact on those around them.