This is the curriculum for children from birth to five years old. At The Bramptons this guides the teaching and learning in our Reception class. There are seven areas of learning which the curriculum is organised into. These are all related to each other, however they are divided into Prime and Specific Areas.
Prime Areas
Involves helping children to develop a positive sense of themselves, and others; to form positive relationships and develop respect for others; to develop social skills and learn how to manage their feelings; to understand appropriate behaviour in groups; and to have confidence in their own abilities.
Involves providing opportunities for young children to be active and interactive; and to develop their co-ordination, control, and movement. Children must also be helped to understand the importance of physical activity, and to make healthy choices in relation to food.
Involves giving children opportunities to experience a rich language environment; to develop their confidence and skills in expressing themselves; and to speak and listen in a range of situations.
Specific Areas
Literacy development involves encouraging children to link sounds and letters and to begin to read and write. Children must be given access to a wide range of reading materials (books, poems and other written materials) to ignite their interest.
Involves providing children with opportunities to develop and improve their skills in counting, understanding and using numbers, calculating simple addition and subtraction problems; and to describe shapes, spaces and measures.
Involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community through opportunities to explore, observe and find out about people, places, technology and the environment.
Involves enabling children to explore and play with a wide range of media and materials, as well as providing opportunities and encouragement for sharing their thoughts, ideas and feelings through a variety of activities in art, music, movement, dance, role-play, and design and technology.
These skills, experiences and learning opportunities are presented to the children through meaningful play contexts and adult led activities. These ensure that each child has the opportunity to play and explore in an active and engaging environment that allows them to be creative, think critically and take risks to achieve more.
Our school has its own curriculum, broadly based on the Inspire Curriculum, to support our delivery of the current National Curriculum. We have designed our curriculum to support our commitment to deliver a curriculum that inspires –
•Achievement and success
•Learning and life skills
•Creative thinking, innovation and enterprise
•Learning through exploration
•Stretch and challenge
•Developing working memory
•Creativity
•Independent and learner-led learning
•Collaborative learning
•Outdoors and nature
•Applied learning
•Authentic tasks with a real audience
•FUN and positive emotional links
The School Curriculum is split into subject based units and each Class will cover 9 units each academic year approximately 4 weeks long. Teachers use this curriculum to enthuse pupils to learn in and out of the classrooms. Our school uses our Curriculum to teach pupils English, Science, Languages, Art & Design, Design & Technology, Geography, History, Computing and Music. After careful consideration the school has decided to teach Maths discretely, as a separate subject, as often ‘topic’ based maths can have tenuous links which can be confusing.
Each progressively planned topic begins with an exciting ‘Launch’ lesson. Teachers publish a breakdown of the curriculum areas to be taught in the unit which can be found on the website. This will ensure parents are fully informed and know exactly the skills their children are being taught in school so that the excitement of learning can continue beyond school into the home!
Talk for Writing has been introduced across the School. It is an innovative approach to teaching writing developed by the literacy specialist and writer Pie Corbett. It uses high quality model texts to introduce the children to different story/text types which they then learn off by heart. Talk for Writing provides the children with the opportunity to orally rehearse the language they will use in their writing. Through its multi-sensory and interactive teaching it enables children of all ages and abilities to learn to write a wide range of fiction and non-fiction text types using various methods including:
building their working knowledge of grammar
Talk for Writing sits alongside this creative approach very well. The Inspire Curriculum furnishes children with the facts and knowledge about the area of study. Talk for Writing gives children the skills needed to present this knowledge in an advanced, informative and satisfying way.
Of course, there is no point in having all this knowledge, combined with amazing writing skills, if no one can read what you have written! We use a handwriting scheme called Kinetic Letters. The advantages of using Kinetic Letters are:
•Narrows the achievement gap between boys and girls
•Learn through movement and multisensory experiences
•Physical programme develops concentration and motor skills
•Motivating targets and personal challenges
•Stories and role play, underpin learning
The school mainly uses the Oxford Reading Tree reading scheme but this is supplemented with other books from a range of schemes to provide the children with a broad range of texts to enjoy and learn from.
CURRICULUM 2017 2018 2018 2019 (372 KB)