How We Teach
The CurriculumAt Stradbroke Primary School learning is defined as:
‘The process of acquiring the essential knowledge, skills understanding and behaviours required for a secure and extended understanding.’
Our Curriclum & How We Teach
‘Designing an Oustanding Curriculum for the children of Stradbroke Primary School’
Our Curriculum document is available to download.
This document defines each subject for each phase of school.
The following documents are available to download:
How We Teach
At Stradbroke Primary School Progress is defined as:
‘The securing of essential knowledge, skills, understanding and behaviour.’
This means that pupils will experience the same content over and over again, each time in a richer and more challenging context, thus extending their understanding further. We do not rush to introduce new content as it is important that pupils have sophisticated problems that challenge them in a wide variety of different and diverse situations first – as supported by our Higher Order Thinking Document (HOT Doc.) which is founded within the concepts of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Pupils will be given increasingly challenging activities at each stage of development as appropriate, as they move through school. This document attempts to capture what that can look like; however, it is not exhaustive and is a guide for teachers to support their planning alongside the National Curriculum. The table below shows the developmental stages of learning, the type of teaching most likely for children in each domain and the typical nature of tasks.
We also use the curriculum to teach and infuse a rich vocabulary throughout – attempting to teach at least 400 new words per year group in an effort to not leave the assimilation of language to simple chance. A language rich curriculum forms the basis for children developing better reasoning skills, greater inference and pragmatic abilities. The more words our children can use in the right context, the more academic success they will have and in turn the greater their chances of employment become during adulthood.
Teachers plan with five key drivers at the forefront of their thinking in order to ensure that learning is as relevant as possible for our children. The key drivers underpin all aspects of the curriculum, they are: Innovation, Experience, Culture, Community and Aspiration which embodies our school motto of Lifelong Learning.
The curriculum then carefully plans for progression throughout Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2, ensuring that there is a cumulative approach to teaching which builds upon skills and knowledge gradually; providing our children with a variety of contexts to practise and apply, then refine and improve.
Provision is designed to advance understanding, gradually throughout a key stage. Lessons are not an event in themselves. They are part of the process of learning which will carry on over several days or even weeks until a pupil is showing the required level of understanding. Some lessons may involve multiple learning objectives.
We pay particular importance to ensuring that all areas of the curriculum are differentiated fittingly, dependent upon the needs of our learners – providing clear structure yet also freedom, to embed skills within each subject area whilst challenging and supporting all appropriately, recognising that the best historian may not necessarily be the best writer; the best musician may not be the best mathematician etc. However, with our curriculum, we can challenge, support, extend and embed children’s understanding within each area of the wider curriculum with accuracy and fluidity.
Pupils are assessed using pre and post learning questions, devised by teachers and interweaved throughout topic planning, which leaves each child with a status as Working Towards, On Track or On Track for the Higher Standard (in-line with our assessment language for English and Maths) depending upon their understanding of the key concepts. It is expected that by the end of each year group, the majority of pupils have a secure understanding and are therefore ‘On Track’ and some will have an extended understanding and are therefore ‘On Track to reach the Higher Standard’.
