What does your child learn at school each day? Find information about our curriculum subjects here.
COVID – Please see below for details of our school curriculum. We have made amendments to planned teaching as part of our Covid recovery curriculum. Our curriculum is driven by an acknowledgement that the challenging climate of the global pandemic will have an impact on all our learners socially and emotionally and so PSHE is a major focus and underpins all that we do.
The school follows the revised National Curriculum focusing primarily on English and maths skills each morning. Through this children are taught the basic skills of reading, writing and maths.
The children follow a graded scheme of phonics from Reception when they will be taught basic phonemes (sounds) and blends. This in turn enables the children to learn to link letters to the sounds they create as well as to begin to read and write.
The school uses Letters and Sounds to support the phonics delivery as well as a number of reading scheme materials including books from The Oxford Reading Tree scheme.
In maths we have are guided by HFL Essentials resources. We place great emphasis on developing maths fluency skills across the school.
The curriculum at Oxhey Wood Primary School is structured around termly themes but each curriculum area is taught as a discrete subject. The purpose of the themes is to provide a mechanism for linking learning to a range of contexts, enriching the learning and enhance the cultural capital that our curriculum content provides. We intend to meet and in some subject areas go beyond the requirements of the National Curriculum. With the development of knowledge organisers we are able to identify the key knowledge, ideas, skills & vocabulary that children will secure through their learning at each key stage.
We have designed the curriculum to support the children’s natural curiosity and stimulate their creativity. We teach a broad and balanced curriculum which promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural mental and physical development of pupils and prepares them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of life. We are a school that promotes and develops lifelong learning and excellent learning habits, supporting progress of pupils during and beyond their time at Oxhey Wood.
Decision have been made on the specific content in the different curriculum areas. The NC provides requirements but varying level of detailed requirements in the different subject areas. So decisions have been made using some key principles which are underpinned by the values of our school. The following are the principles we have referred to when designing our curriculum:
Exploring New Places & Settling – as a community with a relatively short history, settling and making a life in a new place is a thread that is relevant to our children.
e.g. Settlements is a geography topic we have chosen
Aspirations – we have a community of children for whom aspirations are capped by messages given to them at home and limited cultural capital which narrows their conception of what they could aspire to. We make choices about individuals we study which broaden their minds to opportunities whilst maintaining realistic targets. We are also conscious of gender and pupil voice and data often indicates that the girls in school have lower aspirations and lower confident academically.
e.g. we have chosen to include focus on Tudor women, their influence and achievements.
Child Friendly – of course any curriculum should not contain material that is not age appropriate but we think it is important to note that in selecting areas of study we are recognising what content and topics engage and develop children’s curiosity.
e.g. a starting topic in Y1 is toys
Local Links – in designing our curriculum we have tried to focus on local links to a wider topic. Our children need to be taught how their local experiences relate to wider topics and how knowledge learnt relates to and influences their daily life and how their locality has been impacted.
e.g. We study the Romans in history and include Roman Roads and Watling Street as a key part of this learning as it is local to our school.
Contemporary Issues – we want our children to engage with the world around them and so we have designed our curriculum to be able to react to international, national and local issues. We have a specific part of our curriculum that allows a whole school project to be developed in response to events of the particular time. We also review our curriculum annually to be able to respond to issues of the day.
e.g. we are following a whole school theme of the Olympics in 2021.
There are also some guiding principles with regard to the timing of certain topics:
Building Blocks – a main guided to identifying a where particular topic is taught is about building children’s knowledge – knowing more, remembering more – and making progress. Whilst in some curriculum areas the NC does provide a framework for this there are other subjects where the progression must be determined by us
Chronological Understanding – in history, to support children’s chronological understanding we aim to teach topics in KS2 in broadly a chronological way. However, this will be done on the ancient history and modern history strands separately.
e.g. Vikings are taught before Tudors and Ancient Greece is taught before Romans
Outdoor Learning – there will be some topics where we will maximise the learning experience and so the topic will be timed such that the weather is less likely impinge on opportunities.
e.g. fieldwork topics are taught in summer term or autumn one
Cross Curricular Links – whilst we teach our curricular subject individually there is the opportunity to teach topics that have links in the same half term.
e.g. Rocks (science) in Y3 is taught at the same time at Mountains, Volcanoes and Earthquakes (geography)
Natural Fit – there are some topics which naturally fit into a certain term’s learning because of fixed dates and time frames.
e.g. the Easter Story is taught in Spring 2 and New Beginnings (PSHE) is taught in Autumn 1