Curriculum
At Little Stoke we are very proud of our exciting, engaging and relevant themed curriculum. Our curriculum is highly creative and enables children to achieve the highest standards in English, Mathematics and Science but also develop their creative, musical, linguistic, physical, technical, scientific, geographical and historical skills as well. The children’s learning is embedded within a ‘Theme’ which encourages children to make links between subjects, developing knowledge, skills and positive attitudes to learning in a range of contexts. Initially, as a school, we follow the guidance laid down in the National Curriculum from which we have created our curriculum summary sheets for partner year groups. In Religious Education we follow the South Gloucestershire agreed SACRE syllabus.
The New National Curriculum
To find out more information about the new National Curriculum that took effect from September 2014 please click on the link below:
National Curriculum Gov
Year 1 and 2 National Curriculum Summary
Year 3 and 4 National Curriculum Summary
Year 5 and 6 National Curriculum Summary
The Little Stoke Curriculum
However, this is just the beginning! We use the skills identified within the National Curriculum as the basis of our teaching, recognising them as key skills for life-long learning. From this essential content, teachers work together to create curriculum overviews, integrated round a theme and driven by a high quality text which is used to encourage a wide range of language work and links well to other subjects. Topics are tailored to the children’s interests and personalities in mind to provide a more personalised and engaging learning experience.
The overviews below shows the range of themes to be covered in the year 2019-2020. Please see individual class pages to find details of all the themes your children will experience during 2019-2020.
PARENT SUMMARY SHEETS 2019-2020 TERM 1 and 2
YEAR 2 – ‘Let the Adventure Begin!’ TERM 1
YEAR 3 – ‘Illuminate!’ TERM 1 ‘Illuminate!’ TERM 2
YEAR 4 – ‘Mischief Managed!’ TERM 1 ‘Mischief Managed! ‘TERM 2
YEAR 5 – ‘Deep,Dark Depths!’ TERM 1 ‘Deep, Dark Depths!’ TERM 2
PARENT SUMMARY SHEETS TERM 3 and 4
To keep parents informed, teachers send home the themed overviews which give detailed information about the learning the children will be engaged in and ways that parents can support at home. In addition to the curriculum we also send home plenty of information about the wider curriculum: forest school, visits, special events and assemblies, curriculum drivers and learning skills and how these important aspects of learning integrate into the curriculum as a whole.
Phonics
At Little Stoke we use Letters and Sounds and Phonics Play to support the delivery of our high quality, flexible learning programme. This gives our pupils the phonics building blocks they need at an early age to develop reading skills. Please do go along and take a look at the resources on the Phonics Play website.
We use a range of decodable texts which are matched to the phase and sounds your children are working on, The main schemes we use are:
TTS – Letters and Sounds books
Dandelion Readers
Oxford Reading Songbird scheme
Bug Club
Reading at Little Stoke
Our reading curriculum at Little Stoke is rich and varied. We aim to develop children who not only love reading for pleasure but understand its value in every aspect of their lives.
We place an emphasis on reading for meaning and teach the children to develop an ‘inner voice’ whilst they read which enables them to question, wonder and ultimately understand the text at a deep level. In class we teach reading using high quality texts ensuring children can ask questions, refer to their own experiences, link their reading to knowledge they have of the world and make links between different texts they have read.
Each year we have a special reading initiative which exposes children to a wide range of quality children’s texts and encourages children to share these with their friends and family. These initiatives are very popular and are accessed enthusiastically by more than 85% of the school.
This year’s initiative (2019-2020) follows the well-known Dr Seuss saying:
The MORE that you READ, The MORE things you will KNOW
The MORE that you LEARN, The more PLACES you’ll GO.
Children travel their own personal journeys through a range of books in order to visit exciting places in their imagination, reaching milestones as they go.
We do not follow any on reading scheme but rather expose the children to a range of reading schemes and ‘real’ books written by quality authors. In key stage 1, while children are still learning to decode, we do use several phonics based schemes to support this learning including Oxford Reading Tree, Project X and Lego phonics books for example,
Read to Succeed – Ten Reading Aims at Little Stoke Primary School