Our building work is almost complete and the new Reception class will open in September. We will spend the Summer Term equipping the room ready for our new cohort visits. As I have mentioned at the coffee mornings, in our newsletters, and during parent tours, the plan is to have all 60 children together with two class teachers and two nursery officers. Reception often works in this way at the moment since we put a door between the Newts and Sticklebacks and Niamh and Maria teaching together. We’re excited to have this additional learning space and for Y1 to move to the ground floor with access to an outside classroom! This means some year groups will have a geographical shift in September which means everyone benefits.
At Primrose Hill, we are committed to providing a holistic curriculum that maximizes opportunities for meaningful cross-curricular links and learning experiences. Our existing curriculum has been planned to enable such links to be developed and exploited. We place great value on the development of children as individuals. Social, moral, and emotional issues should be given a high profile in the school.
As we work on developing new Curriculum Maps, we will give you more information about the curriculum, either through workshops or through the Year Group Information Newsletters which go out at the start of each half term. We would like to make more focus on children’s interests, topics which are meaningful and relevant to our children and families. If you wish to look at the Curriculum Maps below, please bear in mind these may be different from what will be covered later in the year.
In Key Stage 1, we introduced an integrated and creative approach to planning the curriculum, as we understand that young children learn best through experiencing a curriculum that is relevant and meaningful to them. This is based on good early years practice and in encompassing the National Curriculum requirements. There are whole class Literacy and Numeracy sessions that continue to include recommendations of the strategies. The children will be involved in directed and independent, cross-curricular activities related to the week’s learning objectives, throughout the day, either with an adult or independently. The learning is planned to meet the weekly learning objectives. It is expected that each child will carry out an independent maths and literacy task each day. This should be cross-curricular wherever possible and differentiated as appropriate to meet the children’s individual learning needs.
We follow a topic approach in Key Stage 2. The National Curriculum is much more prescriptive in coverage of key themes and objectives, but we plan to build on this by making clearer links between subjects, being more creative with topic choices, going with children’s interests or events which are happening locally, nationally, and globally and further developing work on oracy and speaking and listening. As a school, we will be developing this throughout the year to establish new Curriculum Maps for September 2018.
Our Curriculum was fully updated for September 2015 and this has been a culmination of work led by the Leaders of Learning and with input from the children during the year. These maps also include our focus on British Values, Equality as well as the enrichment activity which features each topic.
We have revised our Assessment practices this term to coincide with the new National Curriculum Expectations. Children are required to ‘meet the end of year expectations and demonstrate breadth and mastery across the curriculum. This has been a School Improvement Priority this year.
