Our curriculum

English

English teaching, like all other subjects, should be inspiring and exciting for our children. First and foremost we focus on reading for pleasure, as this in itself develops a passion for the written word, a good imagination, and a motivation to read and write for oneself. Every day, in every class, our children have a session where we read to them, as this helps to stretch them and capture their imaginations with more sophisticated stories than they may be able to read independently. Our library is open at lunchtimes for children to enjoy reading or being read to by our Year 5 Librarians.

Early Reading & Phonics

We follow the Read Write Inc scheme for Phonics. This is a synthetic phonics based programme which is a lively and consistent approach to success in raising standards in reading.  This programme is designed to stimulate and challenge children’s thinking and create enthusiastic, lifelong readers and writers in them all. The five key principles of the Read, Write Inc. programme are: Participation, Praise, Pace, Purpose and Passion.

Development of Reading and Writing

To develop reading and writing at Bawdeswell Primary, we teach all aspects of the National Curriculum using the Literary Curriculum from the Literacy Tree. We passionately believe that reading and writing must be both purposeful for the child and inspired by a high quality books and texts. Our teachers have selected the books they believe will best interest and inspire our children to want to then create their own writing, and to read further.  

Maths

At Bawdeswell Primary we strive to make maths fun, engaging and meaningful to every child. Using a range of equipment (manipulatives), we aim to build children’s concrete understanding of numerical concepts. We then move on to develop this understanding using diagrams and pictures, finally securing children’s understanding at abstract/conceptual level. Our daily maths lessons are planned carefully to improve fluency, reasoning and problem solving skills.

We use the White Rose Maths scheme as a base for our curriculum which gives us a clear progression of skills tied in with the national curriculum, ensuring that all objectives are fully covered. As we have mixed year group classes, most of the time children are covering the same unit within their lessons but they are working on different learning objectives based on age related expectations. We track progress daily to ensure good progress.

Our medium term plans, are adapted according to the needs of the children in the class. At the beginning of each area of learning, children complete a short ‘pre-assessment’ to assess how much they already know about the subject area. These pre-assessments enable teachers to plan more accurately for their classes needs. After a sequence of learning has been taught, children complete a ‘post-assessment’ to measure progress throughout the sequence.

Science & Foundation Subjects

In order to provide our children with a thorough and comprehensive understanding of all the key aspects of all of the Foundation Subjects, we have chosen to use high quality resources from specialist providers to support out teaching and inform our sequencing of learning. For Science, History, Geography, RE, Computing, Art & DT, we use the high quality resources from ‘Cornerstones Curriculum 22’ to structure our teaching and learning for these subjects. These resources are adapted for each class to ensure that the sequence of learning for each subject is effective within our mixed year group classes. Cornerstones provides us with an excellent and fully comprehensive, interlinked, inspiring and aspirational curriculum, which we tweak and adapt according to the needs of each class each year. This allows our teachers to focus on high quality teaching of that content, leading to improved learning for the children. For more information about Cornerstones, visit: About | Cornerstones Education.

For MFL we teach our younger pupils Japanese in order to support and foster our relationship with our Japanese Link school, and French for our older children, following the specialist Primary Languages Network resources. SCARF supports our PSGE  and RSE, and Charanga is used to structure our Music curriculum.

PE

Our aim at Bawdeswell Primary is for all of our children to enjoy being active and participating in PE, sports and games. We are proud to have been awarded the School Games Mark at Platinum level for our high-quality provision in PE and Sports at Bawdeswell Primary. This reflects our consistency in providing a well-developed curriculum. Our curriculum is designed to grow children’s overall values as well as skills and techniques using the REAL PE curriculum, and alongside this we provide a weekly sports specific lesson so that our children can confidently compete in local competitions. To learn more about REAL PE visit:

About real PE, BURSTS and Create Development | real PE . To learn more about the Schools Games Mark, visit: Your School Games - What is the School Games?