Our curriculum explained
Intent - The intention behind our curriculum is to grow life-long learners. With a carefully designed partnership between the learning of knowledge, and the opportunities to apply transferable skills, our curriculum will fully equip learners for their future. The curriculum is designed and sequenced to immerse children in the journey of learning, giving continual opportunities to look back and look forward within learning.
Implementation - Our curriculum is used to continually embed and revisit knowledge and skills in varying contexts. Engaging experiences are provided for learners to showcase their knowledge, skills and understanding at every opportunity.
Impact - Achievement across the Curriculum highlights the impact of the partnership between knowledge building and application of transferable skills. Children are consistently supported and challenged to reach their full potential both within lessons and across all aspects of their lives.
Our Curriculum Fully Explained
At Silkmore Primary Academy, our curriculum motivates, engages and inspires the pupils through a progressive and sequenced curriculum. Pupils use ‘Knowledge Constructions’ to build on previous knowledge and skills learnt, allowing pupils to build links in their learning and embed learning within their long-term memory. The learning is then effectively sequenced to ensure depth of learning within specific subject areas.
Each wider curriculum session has a wider question in mind to be answered throughout, which allows the children to apply their learning to context and to assess their understanding.
Teaching and learning are underpinned by cognitive challenge, ensuring there is no limitation or ‘glass ceiling’ on what children can achieve.
Teachers ask three questions as they initiate their learning to know that learning is secure and purposeful:
- What are we learning about?
- Why are we learning about it?
- How will we know if we have been successful?
Pupils then return back to these questions during the learning sessions to allow them to reflect on their learning and further build links, looking forwards at how these apply to future learning and becoming positive members of the community.
Effective pitch and challenge occur by careful and strategic task matching, questioning and scaffolding resources. Staff create the correct conditions for learning by delivering learning centralising around an Essential Learning Objective and providing opportunities for depth within this.
Classroom environments engage and inspires children and supports their learning by immersing them in ambitious vocabulary, added to continuously. This supports the pupils’ literacy and writing development throughout their mission.
Every session will have opportunities to engage with peer-to-peer or small group dialogue, encouraging children to articulate their thoughts and learning and effectively challenge each other.
A focus for our curriculum is to prepare our pupils to be ‘secondary ready’ by the time they leave Silkmore. This is achieved by providing contextualized, purposeful learning that develop ‘life skills’ and focusses on pupils’ development in becoming writers, mathematicians, historians and geographers etc, subsequently covering the National Curriculum in depth across the year.
Silkmore ‘Learning Attitudes Values’ of AIM HIGH will be central in encouraging pupils to be responsible for their learning attitudes. Throughout their learning, pupils are given opportunities to reflect on how their learning attitudes are developing in accordance to the AIM HIGH learning values. Pupils demonstrating these attitudes are recognised and rewarded within the classroom and the whole school celebration assembly (see behaviour policy).
If you would like to know more about our curriculum, please call the office on 01785 333930 or email [email protected].