Use the Curriculum menu to select Curriculum Overviews for each year group.
Our Curriculum for Derby
We deliver a full and exciting curriculum that not only meets the national requirements, but is tailored to children growing up in Derby. Our ‘Curriculum for Derby’ is based on teaching children the knowledge and skills they will need for their adult working life in an engineering /manufacturing city. Every lesson has a purpose that is shared with the children, so that they can see the relevance of learning. Through engaging topics like Gayton’s Marvellous Medicine, Cool Planet, Funny Bones, Friend or Foe and Time Travellers, the children are engaged and enthused to learn. We visit exciting places and invite many people into school to support our curriculum delivery.
“Pupils have a very mature attitude to school and recognise how important this is in helping them prepare for the future.” OFSTED 2013
Whilst teaching the children the knowledge they need, we also teach the children how to be learners. Lessons are planned to develop children’s ability in these key skills for learning, all of which will be useful in later life and will develop positive attitudes to learning.
Over the last few years, we have developed an approach to learning called Learn2Learn. We feel it is important that the children develop a set of key skills and attitudes that will best equip them for learning throughout their lives. These skills and attitudes help children develop self-awareness and resilience in learning; to transfer skills and learning from one context to another and to understand how they learn best and to use this effectively.
Our key attitudes are:
Our curriculum is organised in such a way that these skills and attitudes develop as part of our everyday learning.
A daily one hour lesson developing reading, writing, speaking and listening skills. Children are taught in ability groups to help focus teaching at a comfortable yet challenging level. Blocks of lessons focus on specific texts, with planned activities to engage the children in the genre before they write their own texts at the end of a unit.
A daily one hour lesson focussing on different elements of Maths. A weekly session helps the children practise their arithmetic skills. Again, children are taught in ability groups to help focus teaching at a comfortable yet challenging level. From 2020, children in Year 4 will take an online times tables test. The National Curriculum specifies that pupils should be taught to recall the multiplication tables up to and including 12 × 12 by the end of Year 4. The purpose of the test is to determine whether pupils can recall their times tables fluently, which is essential for future success in mathematics. It has been designed to help schools to identify pupils who have not yet mastered their times tables, so that additional support can be provided. The test is taken online. Similar tests can be found on Mathletics, which we have subscribed to. Maths Chase provides a fun version to support the learning of times tables.
Please click here to visit our Assessment Page which shows the expectations in Literacy and Maths for children in all four year groups.
Science modules are taught in half termly blocks. Much of the work is practical and encourages the children to develop their thinking skills.
Children use laptops in most areas of the curriculum when appropriate to either research or present their work. Through this they develop their understanding of what each of the programmes can do. Computing skills are taught in weekly sessions in our Tech Lab and are linked to other curriculum areas where possible.
Every child has two PE lessons a week. Indoor lessons focus on fitness and agility, dance and gymnastics. Outdoor lessons focus on striking and fielding games, athletics and team games. Children in Year 3 also have a weekly swimming lesson.
A weekly half an hour French lesson is supported by teachers using French in other lessons when appropriate, for example when giving instructions such as ‘sit down’ and ‘asseyez-vous’.
In our thematic curriculum lessons we find common threads between our Art, DT, Geography, History, PSHE and Music lessons. Children can then relate their learning across the subjects we teach.
This example of a typical timetable shows you what lessons your child will have each week.
|9.00 – 10.00||10.00 – 11.00||11.00 – 11.15||11.15 – 12.15||12.15 – 1.20||1.20 – 2.15||2.15 – 3.10||3.10 – 3.30|
|Monday||French / PSHE||Literacy||Break||Maths||Lunch||Reading||Indoor PE||Whole school assembly|
|Wednesday||Literacy||Outdoor PE||Break||Maths||Lunch||Topic||Topic||Whole school assembly|
|Thursday||Science||Literacy||Break||Maths||Lunch||Computing||Topic||Lower school Assembly|
|Friday||Spellings & Handwriting||Literacy||Break||Maths||Lunch||Topic||Topic||Whole school assembly|