Curriculum

The Shephalbury Park Curriculum Intent

The school’s high quality planned curriculum aims to provide a depth of learning through rich, inclusive and varied activities and experiences. It provides learners with a learning journey that nurtures their interests, provides challenge, enjoyment and promotes the principles of the Shephalbury LEARNER.

The skills based curriculum is sequential and progressive between year groups, and is developed by curriculum leaders. It offers learners the opportunity to build on prior knowledge, provides opportunities to reflect and make links to other subject areas.

We provide a curriculum which is tailored to the needs and interests of our learners so that they can develop an understanding of themselves, the people around them, where they live, the local area and their place within the wider world.

Our Shephalbury LEARNER attributes are actively woven throughout our curriculum, and evident within the teaching and learning across the school. Teachers use these attributes to encourage learners to develop a growth mindset and further challenge their skills as independent learners.

We follow a thematic approach to learning where we link learning opportunities within topics and themes to transcend different discrete subject areas. History, Geography, Art and D&T are taught through these topics  and where possible English, science, music and computing are incorporated too. Regular staff meetings are used to discuss various aspects of the curriculum and ensure consistency of approach and standards.

We believe that all areas of our curriculum can benefit from the outdoors and we take every opportunity to move learning beyond the classroom and into our fantastic outdoor environment.

Above all, our curriculum recognises our learners as individuals, and they play an active part of reviewing this throughout each year. We want what we offer to be meaningful, engaging and inclusive so as develop enquiring minds and a deep love of learning.

For more information about our curriculum please contact Mrs Finch or Mrs Dean through the school office.

English Curriculum

At Shephalbury Park, we intend for our learners to acquire, through high-quality teaching of English, the fundamental skills essential to access knowledge and understanding across the curriculum. We intend for children to confidently communicate their knowledge and ideas effectively using a wide vocabulary. Through immersion in high-quality texts, we hope to instil a love of reading and develop creativity within our learners.

Phonics 

At Shephalbury Park, we follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics programme, with children in EYFS and KS1 participating in a daily phonics session. Children in Nursery develop the foundation skills for phonics, with teaching based on Phase 1 of Letters and Sounds.

Children in Reception and KS1 are taught in small groups, accurately matched to their starting points through our half-termly assessments. Children requiring further support participate in additional Little Wandle Keep Up sessions to ensure they make progress. All staff have received training to teach the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics programme.

Reading

Children across the school take part in a daily adult-led guided reading session. In Nursery, children participate in a whole class session, developing their love of reading and understanding of books. As they move into Reception and KS1, children’s guided reading takes place in small groups, using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised reading books. Across KS2, guided reading is predominantly taught as a whole class with smaller groups receiving additional support where this is required.  

Our early home reading books are all phonetically decodable and matched to the phase of phonics children are currently working at. These are all aligned to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression. As children develop as readers, they move to reading books from the PM scheme which supports them to develop their fluency and prosody alongside their comprehension skills. Children in KS2 learn to retrieve and infer key information, predict and summarise, compare and analyse texts. In KS2, we use VIPERS to focus children on the skills which they are learning. 

Talk for Writing

We use the Talk for Writing approach in our English lessons. Each three-week unit focuses on three distinct areas: In the ‘Imitation’ phase, children develop their speaking and listening skills, explore a model text and identify its key features. In the ‘Innovation’ phase, children unpick the text further, creating a ‘skills toolkit’ which they can use in their own writing. In the final phase, ‘Independent Application’, children create a finished piece of writing based on the model text. Each unit begins with a ‘cold task’ to assess children’s current skills and ends with a ‘hot task’ to assess the progress made in the unit.

Maths Curriculum

At Shephalbury Park, we intend for our learners to be confident and skilled in all aspects of mathematics. This includes; manipulation of number, problem solving, having the language needed to reason mathematically and to be able to apply these skills, confidently and systematically, in secondary school and in real life situations. 

The maths curriculum at Shephalbury Park is delivered through a mastery approach, which gives our learners a secure understanding of the maths that’s been taught and enables them to progress.

We follow the national curriculum and each year group has an overview of the maths for that year. This is then split into three terms and each term comprises of individual units or blocks of learning, which are then broken down into small steps. This allows our learners to gain strong foundational knowledge and understanding and provides opportunities for consolidation.

Within the maths curriculum we focus on fluency, reasoning and problem solving.

In fluency, we develop rapid and accurate recall and provide a concrete, pictorial and abstract (CPA) approach when introducing new concepts to build competency.

To develop conceptual understanding we provide opportunities for our learners to justify their views through reasoning using mathematical language and solve problems by applying maths in variety of problems. 

Science

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”-Chinese Proverb

Science can be split into two main sections: Skills & Knowledge. Within the knowledge section it is again spilt into topics. These skills can be use across all of these topics. Both are built upon each year and each key stage.

In many ways, teaching and facilitated learning of the skills is as important as learning knowledge, as once the children have all these skills they have everything they need to pursue this knowledge on their own.

These can be split into asking questions, testing/enquiry and answering questions.

Computing

At Shephalbury Park, we desire for our children to be independent, computational thinkers, who have the ability to be creative and solve problems. We want our children to master concepts, and develop strategies to create new ones. We want to model and encourage our children to use technology positively, responsibly and safely. We want STEM (Science, Technology and Mathematics) to be at the core of our curriculum, developing links through the technological world

Geography

We want our Geography Curriculum to allow our learners to have a better understanding of the people, places and the environments of the world. We want our learners to ask questions and to learn where they live within the world and within the British Isles. By using a range of tools and vocabulary our learners will understand their location and the landscapes of contrasting environments. They will appreciate, describe and have a desire to conserve the differing environments of the world as well as be able to draw on a range of vocabulary to identify and name places of the world as well as recognise the human and physical features at work in the differing places that they study.  

History

We want our History Curriculum to fire our learner’s curiosity so that they are encouraged to develop a chronological framework of British history and learn about key influential historical figures, peoples and societies and their contributions to Britain and the world. We want our learners to have an understanding of how we lived here in Britain in the past and how people in the wider world lived. We want our learners to understand the process of change and to see how we arrived ‘here’ in the present. We want our learners to realise that the past is gone but history has and can be used to construct our futures.

Art

We want our Art Curriculum to inspire and create a love of the visual Arts for all learners. We want to develop creativity, set challenges, engage and inspire our learners and equip them with the knowledge and skills to experiment, invent and create their own works of art and design. The curriculum will enable learners to create art work with a real purpose to display and share with others.

Design & Technology

We want our DT Curriculum to provide learners with a real life context for learning. Our DT Curriculum follows the design, make and evaluate cycle. At each stage technical knowledge and vocabulary is shared.  The DT process at Shephalbury is inspired by engineers, designers, chefs and architects that enable learners to create a range of their own structures, mechanisms, textiles, electrical systems and food products with a real life purpose.

PE

In PE we aim to inspire and celebrate active learners with a variety of competition, sport and fitness using a whole child approach. Through our ambitious, sequenced and progressive curriculum, we aim to teach learners about the physical, social, emotional and cognitive aspects related to PE, whilst developing a love and understanding of the benefits of a healthy lifestyle for both physical and mental wellbeing.

Music

At Shephalbury Park Primary School the intention is that children gain a firm understanding of what music is through listening to high quality live and recorded music, singing, playing evaluating and composing across a range of styles and music genres embedded within our creative curriculum. Our objective is to develop a curiosity for the subject through a range of learning experiences through which we aim to build confidence of all children.

PSHE

At Shephalbury Park, we intend for our learners to become healthy, independent and responsible members of our modern society with the knowledge, skills and strategies to play a positive role in contributing to school life and the wider community.

Spanish

Our intent is that through the four key language learning skills; listening, speaking, reading and writing, all learners will develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, finding them enjoyable and stimulating. Learning a second language will also offer learners the opportunity to explore relationships between language and identity, develop a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them with a better awareness of self, others and cultural differences.