Our Curriculum
At St Aelred’s, we want children to be excited to learn. Our highly ambitious school curriculum is informed by our school’s vision and core values of friendship, courage and respect. We have created a broad and balanced curriculum that represents and experiences ‘life in all its fullness’.
Our curriculum is deliberately designed to give our children the tools and provision to know more, do more and remember more. Our priority is to improve teaching through evidence-led structure and practice, so that all children are exposed to exceptional teaching.
Our curriculum is designed so that subject knowledge is planned sequentially and enables children to make connections to prior learning. Explicit vocabulary instruction strengthens cognitive connections. To help children to learn and remember new knowledge, opportunities for recapping and knowledge retrieval are key features of our curriculum to ensure children store knowledge in their long-term memory and can recall this with ease: transferring their knowledge into different situations and applying it to a range of contexts, whilst freeing up their working memory to learn more.
We seek to give pupils a range of curriculum enrichment experiences, embracing our local area of York and beyond through trips and arranging visitors to school. Some of the additional opportunities we provide include learning and competing in different sports, playing musical instruments, singing and performing and taking part in charitable work.
Our Pedagogy
Our lesson structure and sequence is based on Rosenshine’s principles for Effective Classroom Practice. These principles enable us as teachers to engage with our practice at a forensic level, reflect on our practice and achieve the best possible progress and outcomes for our children. Rosenshine’s principles are based on three sources of research:
- Research on how the brain acquires new information (the science)
- Research on the classroom practices of those teachers whose students had the highest gains
- Findings from studies that taught learning strategies to students
Implementation
- Connect to prior learning
- Explain the intent knowledge
- The teacher gives an example of the learning
- Pupils attempt the learning. “Our turn or your turn”
- Record (apply) the learning, to ensure learning is consolidated, connected and embedded.
- Challenge is provided for deeper thinking
Learning is embedded in responsive teaching, therefore it is not essential to have every element of our teaching model covered in a single lesson, learning is a process. Teachers have autonomy about how and when they deploy the relevant tools and strategies to support the learning sequence.
Our curriculum plans are well structured and set out in a way which builds on prior learning, ensures high expectations and supports teacher workload. Teachers demonstrate a high level of ambition for their pupils and the ongoing use of questioning, vocabulary building and application are features of agreed pedagogy.
We place a strong emphasis on vocabulary acquisition and understanding when delivering our curriculum. We explicitly teach vocabulary and unpick word meaning. We have adopted a tiered approach to teaching vocabulary across subjects.
Tier 1 is basic vocabulary needed to function in everyday life, e.g book, girl, run.
Tier 2 vocabulary focuses on high frequency and multiple meaning words, e.g society, absorb.
Tier 3 vocabulary is associated with low frequency and context-specific words, e.g Paleolithic, oesophagus. Children will hear and often be able to read many of these words, but we also ensure that they have a good understanding of them too.
Outcomes for learners
Through the design and implementation of the curriculum at St Aelred’s, we aim for pupils to:
- Become independent learners who demonstrate positive attitudes, confidence, resilience, perseverance and creativity, and who enjoy both academic and physical challenge.
- Be fluent communicators – both orally and in writing, efficient mathematicians and competent, skilful and responsible users of IT.
- To be competent readers with a love of reading, which becomes life-long; learn knowledge, skills and understanding across subjects of the curriculum, at the same time as making links, grasping concepts and seeing the ‘bigger picture’.
- Develop agility and physical skills and enjoy being physically active and participating in sports and games.
- Respond imaginatively and sensitively to the arts.
- Have a growing understanding of the world: locally, nationally and globally, plus an understanding of and positive attitude to diversity and citizenship.
- Understand and have participated in initiatives to play a part in taking care of our Common Home.
- Develop Christian values with a focus on our core values of friendship, courage and respect.
- Develop an understanding of the Catholic faith and of other world faiths.
- Grow in their understanding of religion and belief, and have the opportunity to develop their own faith and spirituality.
- Develop good social and emotional awareness and positive physical and mental health and wellbeing.
Pupil Voice
“We always get to go on such amazing trips about things we have been learning in class. We got to go to the Yorkshire Wildlife Park because we were learning about animals and then we went to Howsham Mill because we were learning about Rocks.”
“I love History. I loved learning about the Stone Age. Someone from the University of York came in and taught us lots of facts and then we made some prehistoric jewellery.”
“Going on trips and having people come in helps make the learning real and you get to see the kind of jobs you can do with each subject when you leave school.”
Please click on each subject area on the right to find out more.
If you would like to find out more information about our curriculum, please contact Mr Deakin through [email protected]
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-primary-curriculum
