Our Curriculum
Rivelin Curriculum
Intent
At Rivelin, our curriculum has been designed to cover all of the skills, knowledge and understanding as set out in the National Curriculum. We then enhance the National Curriculum by ensuring that our content meets the needs of all our pupils. In addition, we enrich learning through providing experiences including visits, visitors, life-skills and drama that build real-life, memorable learning.
Throughout our curriculum, we provide many opportunities for purposeful talk in and outside the classroom, ensuring that children have opportunities to articulate their learning and embed knowledge and concepts on a daily basis. All children, no matter what their level of language is, have the support to achieve and contribute their ideas with others. Our curriculum builds on cultural capital, celebrates British Values and is underpinned by our Whole School Core Values- Respect, Kindness, Honesty, Determination, Curiosity, Dignity and Integrity.
To ensure that pupils develop secure knowledge, vocabulary, and skills that they can build on, our curriculum is organised into a progression model that outlines the knowledge, vocabulary and skills to be taught in a sequentially coherent way in each year group. All aspects of the curriculum are carefully mapped out to ensure that pupils build on secure prior knowledge so that they can make meaningful connections. Each subject taught has its own progression grid, designed by the curriculum leader for that subject.
When covering each subject, the progression grids will be carefully organised by each year group team through a long-term plan. Knowledge, vocabulary and skills will then be planned for at a greater level of detail in medium term plans and within the consistency in lesson slides used to teach pupils within the classroom. All subjects are delivered through subject specific teaching organised into blocks under a theme. Meaningful links with other subjects are made to strengthen connections and understanding for pupils.
Implementation
All learning will start by revisiting prior knowledge and reviewing what the children have learnt before. This will be scaffolded to support children to recall previous learning and make connections between prior and new learning. Staff will model explicitly the subject specific knowledge, vocabulary and skills relevant to the learning to allow pupils to integrate new knowledge into larger concepts.
Teachers support children to practice new learning, questioning for understanding, checking for misconceptions and giving direct and appropriate feedback. This moves children from supported practice to independence at the correct pace for them, ensuring all children are challenged.
Learning is supported through the use of the learning environment that provides children with scaffolding that supports them to retain new facts and vocabulary in their long-term memory. All classrooms use working walls to capture knowledge, steps for success, vocabulary and key questions to scaffold learners to work towards independence.
All lessons are built around language and enable children to regularly articulate their thoughts and ideas with others. Oracy skills are explicitly taught so that children become effective speakers in the classroom, including the physical, linguistic, cognitive and social and emotional strands that make up verbal communication.
We use our communal displays as our ‘learning showcase’ which highlights the outcome of pupils learning across a range of subjects. Children are then encouraged to use the learning showcase as a stimulus to talk about their learning and inspire pupils to become excited about the subject content they will study through their time at Rivelin Primary.
Weekly curriculum quizzes are used to review learning and check that children know more and remember more. Learning is reviewed also on a termly basis, after a period of forgetting, so that teachers can check whether information has been retained.
Assessment is ongoing throughout the relevant cross-curricular themes to inform teachers with their lesson planning, activities and differentiation.
Our children will be given a variety of experiences both in and out of the classroom, where appropriate, to create memorable learning opportunities, to apply their knowledge to wider concepts and to further support and develop their understanding and language acquisition.
Impact
At Rivelin Primary, the impact of our curriculum is shown in several ways:
In core subjects, impact is shown through the progress and outcomes of pupils in national testing and summative testing throughout the academic year. These assessments inform the success of teaching and learning and identify pupils who require further support to achieve. Pupil voice and the quality of work in pupils’ books demonstrates the deeper impact on pupils knowing and remembering more, the positive attitudes to learning pupils foster and also demonstrate the consolidation of key skills. As pupils read and write for varied purposes across the curriculum, the impact of the core curriculum can be seen as pupils embed these skills widely. The impact of the core curriculum can also be seen through the uptake of extra-curricular clubs including enterprise, mathematics, newspaper and the debate team.