Through our curriculum we want our children to become well rounded individuals and educated citizens. Our curriculum is designed with the intention of giving our children knowledge and understanding of the best that has been thought, discovered and said by people across the world. We want to engender in our children an appreciation of human creativity and achievement, and an ambition to make their own unique mark upon the world.
In order to do this, we recognise that our children need to develop their Resilience, Risk Taking and Independence. Our children need to experience a curriculum that exposes them to a wide range of cultures and to appreciate the Diversity of the World.
For all subjects we follow the National Curriculum and additional DFE guidance.
Children revisit learning and build on their prior learning throughout our curriculum, in order to retain the knowledge that they acquire. We use carefully chosen schemes of work to ensure that our curriculum is well mapped and that our children have engaging learning experiences, which build on their bank of concepts and knowledge.
We are an inclusive school and, through our Quality First teaching and additional provisions, we ensure that all pupils have access to our broad curriculum offer.
As a small school, with mixed year groups, we have designed a curriculum in which each foundation subject follows a pathway with a 2-year cycle. Each pathway is sequential and aims to build on prior learning.
The cycle is illustrated here.
|
Academic Year |
Teaching Year (A or B) |
|
2023 – 2024 |
Year A |
|
2024 – 2025 |
Year B |
Details about the learning pathways in each subject and about the content of the curriculum can be found in the subject areas on this page of the website.
If you would like further information about our curriculum, please contact the school office: 01905 620418 office@sytchampton.worcs.sch.uk.
Individual Reading
Children are allocated reading books in line with their progress on the 'Phonic Shed' scheme. These are checked on a half termly basis, to ensure that the books children are given enable them to practice fluent reading at the appropriate level. Children are also given the opportunity to choose from a choice of home books to build a love of reading.
These books are for your child to read to you. They have been carefully chosen so that children can use the skills they have learnt in phonics to read all the words. Some books will have words for you to read with your child, these are known as ‘share with me’ books. Other books will have no words for the children to read but contain detailed pictures to discuss and create their own story. Most books will have key words to practise before, and suggested questions for you to ask about the story after they have read it – you can ask other questions too as those provided are just a guide!
In KS2 the children will continue to move through our book banded system.
Writing
At Sytchampton Primary School, children learn how to write effectively through 'The Write Stuff' philosophy. From the start of a unit, children are guided through a range of writing experiences and key focii which expose them to a wide range of vocabulary and supports development of sentence structuring skills. This provides all the support they need before independent writing.
There are three zones of writing which are taught during the lessons:
- Vocabulary (ideas)
- Grammar (tools)
- Literary Devices (techniques)
These are taught through the ‘FANTASTICs’, ‘GRAMMARISTICs’ and ‘BOOMTASTICs’ of the Writing Rainbow
The intention of the maths curriculum at Sytchampton Endowed Primary School is that children are taught to become competent and confident mathematicians. We aim to develop children’s enjoyment with maths and promote a positive can-do attitude. We use a ‘teaching for mastery’ approach to our mathematics curriculum, which means we are aiming for children to have a deep, long-term, secure and adaptable understanding of the subject.
Children are guided along a coherent, small step journey together, using concrete, pictorial and abstract representations to explore concepts and build connections, with opportunities to both support and challenge thinking and reasoning. Teachers take our small steps from the White Rose scheme of learning.
We intend for children at Sytchampton to have:
- fluency (rapid and accurate recall and application of facts and concepts)
- a growing confidence to reason mathematically
- the ability to apply maths to different contexts in order to solve problems
- an understanding that everyone can make progress in maths
To raise fluency standards in Maths, we have introduced KIRFs (Key Instant Recall Facts) as a whole-school program. Each half-term will have a different KIRF focus. It is important that children know these facts thoroughly and can recall them instantly. The KIRFs are designed to be learned to automaticity to reduce children’s cognitive load when working on methods/ calculations. These KIRFs are progressive throughout the year groups.
In school, and at home, we use the TTRockstars and NumBots apps for children to practice their times tables. Each week we have in class battles and the top 3 players from each class earn a certificate! In EYFS and Year 1 we also use the White Rose 1 minute maths app to practice our subitizing, number bonds and early calculations. In KS2 we also do Club Maths where we try to improve our times table scores and move up to the next club!