The Amington Heath Primary School Curriculum
Intent
Amington Heath Primary School is a close, community-centred school which nurtures independent, confident learners who are equipped for the future. Working together, we provide a safe, inclusive environment in which every child is a valued member. Amington Heath is a place where all children love learning. Children experience great teaching through an enriching curriculum that is relevant, varied and engaging.
Our curriculum is carefully crafted to meet the needs of our children and the community they live in. PSHE is woven throughout the curriculum and ensuring that our children are prepared for the successes and demands of the community they are growing up in. Our curriculum also prepares children for life beyond their community, for example, through the high profile of religious education, forest schools and citizenship.
Our curriculum recognises the value of all subject areas and allows children to shine regardless of where their skills and talents lie. Our mini adventure approach ensures that all subjects are taught in an engaging and stimulating manner where purpose and context are key.
Our curriculum:
Raises aspirations for all children
Gives learning a REAL purpose
Inspires and immerses children in their learning
Is underpinned by the school values and learning behaviours
Ensures that children are secondary ready by being heavily based on skills
Is memorable and experiential
Celebrates the process of learning
Promotes collaboration within the school and wider community
Provides entrepreneurial experiences
Prepares children for an ever changing world beyond their current community
Implementation
At Amington Heath Primary School, our concentric curriculum motivates, engages and inspires the pupils through a series of learning journeys that we have titled ‘mini-adventures’. All of the curriculum areas are then delivered through this adventure. The beginning of each adventure is designed to hook all pupils in and acts as the ‘stunning start’ to the learning. Pupils are also made aware of what the ‘fantastic finish’ for this adventure will be so that they can always put their learning into context across the mini adventure.
The learning journey that the pupils go on, covers all subjects and are captured in one book. The adventures allow for clear coverage of the National Curriculum. Coverage of curriculum areas is evident in the schools curriculum coverage plans.
Teaching and learning is underpinned by cognitive challenge. Teachers use the principles of Bloom’s Taxonomy to ensure differentiation is appropriate and does not place a glass ceiling on learning for any pupil.
Differentiation occurs by careful and strategic task matching and questioning and staff create the correct conditions for learning by delivering learning centralising around a learning objective and providing opportunities for depth within this.
The environment engages and inspires pupils but is also language rich to support the pupils’s oracy and writing development throughout the mini-adventure.
A focus for our adventures is to prepare our pupils to be ‘secondary ready’ by the time they leave Amington Heath Primary School. This is achieved by providing contextualized, purposeful learning that develop life skills, learning behaviours and focuses on pupils’ development in becoming writers, mathematicians, historians and geographers etc.
Amington Heath learning behaviours are shared through the Amington Aliens which are central in encouraging pupils to be responsible for their learning attitudes. Throughout the adventures, pupils are given opportunities to reflect on how their learning attitudes are developing in accordance to the learning behaviours. Pupils demonstrating these attitudes are recognised and rewarded within the classroom and the whole school celebration assembly.
At Amington Heath Primary School, we believe the bridge between teaching and learning is assessment. Therefore, our feedback policy is an integral aspect to the curriculum. The feedback policy ensures that learning is addressed and celebrated or moved forward in accordance to the essential learning objective where the planning has been derived from. At Amington Heath feedback is positive, reflective, challenging and provides opportunities for a teacher to communicate how successful a piece of work is and how this can be further improved. Pupils are given time to reflect on the feedback that the teacher gives.
To find out more about our curriculum please contact the school office on 01827 337465