Curriculum Overview
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart.” Colossians 3:23
Curriculum Intent
At Amesbury, our purpose is to connect learners as local citizens of today with the ideas, knowledge and skills they will need as the global citizens they must become. At Amesbury, we want to enable all children to achieve and prepare them for the next stage in their life by ensuring they are proficient in the knowledge and skills that they need to be successful alongside ensuring they have developed the personal attributes needed to enable them to become successful citizens of the future.
We will help them to be curious, ask probing questions and be brave in finding solutions.
The children will engage with the familiar and be engaged by the unusual; be immersed in language and communicate in another language; know how to practise, be resilient and challenged; to be proud of their local environment and think on a global scale; work individually and add their voice to the many; to accept help, give charitably and embrace altruism; to love difference, be different and stand up for the rights of others just because it is the right thing to do.
We want them to be relentlessly creative, critically curious and to live ambitiously.
Our intention is to create a culture of enquiry, curiosity and challenge that permeates both explicit and hidden curricula.
Everything we do is underpinned by our Christian values of: ambition, courage and empathy and our mission statement of, ‘“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart” Colossians 3:23.
Curriculum Implementation
Our school is in the early stages of implementing a local, bespoke version of the Curious-city approach that inspires and guides our teachers to create contextually relevant enquiry-led experiences. This enquiry-led approach is enabling our school to create a bespoke, locally focused curriculum over the course of two years that goes beyond the National Curriculum 2014. We use this approach to teach: Geography, History, Science, Music, Art and DT.
The skeleton planning of curious and creative learning opportunities, progressively planned and matched to cognitive development, exposes our children to the wider world in carefully planned stages. The skeletons provide just enough guidance whilst enabling our teachers to inspire our children with local people, places and stories relevant to our school’s locality. The current structure also has plenty of room to respond to the ever changing world. Enquiries are shaped by our school over time.
We implement the enquiry-led approach in several ways. Using seven themes that help to steer and give a particular flavour to an enquiry, children seek answers to questions posed. The seven themes help teachers ensure that a broad range of perspectives are offered during a year, and that they understand the purpose of the enquiry. This helps create a balance of experiences each and every year and ensures a breadth of experience in every year group.
States of Being enable learners to focus on and/or combine powerful knowledge in different enquiries. Each knowledge-engaged state symbolises an aspect of the curriculum, helping children to master both the know of and know how of a subject, not just remember it. For instance, we want our children to be Scientists, not just learn about science. As a result, whilst we have enquiry skeletons, we build on these responding to the needs of our children: as they get older, we help them cross-pollinate states. We want our children to discover for themselves that they can be an Author, Scientist, Geographer and Philosopher at the same time and that some adults combine these states to become Archaeologists, for instance. We want our children to see the interconnection between what they are learning in how this knowledge is applied.
We believe, “It takes a village,” to raise a child. Therefore, we are passionate about involving our school community in our learning and sharing our successes with them. Therefore, we regularly communicate our learning with parents via the online platform Seesaw. We also place great value on educational visits, which we organise to help provide the children with cultural capital and to give them experiences that enhance their learning.
Cognitive development aligned with enquiry-led learning
In a nutshell, enquiry-led learning provokes children with key questions too big to answer in one go, but not so conceptually large that they cannot understand. The purpose is to guide children through a scaffolded process, answering the big question with a piece of writing for example, performance or animation. As cognitive development, emotional literacy and language immersion underpin the Curious-city approach, as well as purposeful links to mastery-led learning principles and attachment theory, we recognise children's awareness of the world develops as they mature and that this has a significant impact on their ability to learn. Our job is to help learners make sense of the world, not just expose them to it.
More than the National Curriculum
At Amesbury Primary, we believe that all children deserve a balanced and ambitious curriculum that enables them to develop a deep understanding of all subjects and the interconnections between them. National Curriculum subject objectives for Science, History, Geography, Art & Design, Design and Technology, Music are woven throughout enquiries as seen on the Whole School Enquiries Map. Some subjects (renamed using the States of Being) are taught discreetly or by specialists, such as: Foreign Languages, Physical Education, Religious Education [Understanding Christianity/Discovery RE], PSHE [Jigsaw] and SMSC. Where possible links are made, but more often than not, they are stand alone experiences.
Lessons may also feel different in our setting from the norm. Think of a child’s time in school as a continuum of experiences rather than a set of lessons. Sometimes experiences are short, sharp and immersive, other times they are light-touch events over a longer period of time. This is exactly what a curious, knowledge-engaged curriculum should be. The usual Author (English) and Mathematicians (Maths) teaching sequences continue, enhanced by locally rich and relevant experiences through the inclusion of significant people, places and stories by weaving in faith, community and culture into enquiries.
Curriculum Impact
The impact of Curious-city can be seen and heard as well as represented in outcomes. Impact can be seen through the children's books, displays and challenges the children produce. In classrooms and in corridors enquiry working walls and displays demonstrate the learning journey; States of Being characters should feature in books, classroom displays and visual timetables as well as our website and newsletters. We know that when inspectors have visited other schools, the Curious-city approach has been talked about as having a positive impact on learning; our setting is no different. We know that in time, it will affect our reading and writing outcomes as the contexts and purpose for being an Author, for instance, become stronger and stronger.
By the time our pupils leave Amesbury C of E Primary School, they will be ready for the challenges of secondary school. They will have the confidence, knowledge and skills that will allow them to make a successful transition so that they can flourish in Key Stage 3 and as future citizens of the world.
To find out more about our local, knowledge-engaged, globally connected, enquiry-led curriculum ask us about the deliberate action we are taking to shape our curriculum to meet the needs of our learners and community that we are proudly a part of.
Our Curriculum Key Drivers
Our Christian values and ethos permeate all aspects of our curriculum and daily life. They inform every decision we make, our pupils and their families are absolutely at the heart of all we do.
Our mission statements says,
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart.” Colossians 3:23
Our three Christian values: ambition, courage and empathy are the backbone of our curriculum and underpin everything we do for OUR children in OUR community.
quick-abc-activities-to-enjoy-at-home.pdf States of Being for families.pdf