Curriculum Statement
At Wellesbourne, our curriculum is designed to provide a broad, balanced and progressive education that meets the needs of all pupils and gives children the skills, knowledge and understanding to prepare them for their future lives. Our curriculum aims to inspire all children to develop kindness, resilience and their service leading to a passion for being a lifelong learner and an upstanding citizen.
Through our Christian ethos, children will learn first and foremost to be tolerant, understanding members of the community who display kindness above all else to all people. We aim to provide the children with a knowledge based curriculum that also builds key skills and enables the children to become resilient learners.
Our curriculum is planned by our staff with the National Curriculum as the foundation and each year group progressively builds the schema for each of the subjects as they move through the school. We also love to tie in our topics with exciting, quality books that inspire the children and bring those subjects to life for our pupils with sense of awe and wonder.
Our Knowledge Organisers share with the children the sequential key knowledge they will learn and the key vocabulary they will need to develop their understanding throughout that unit. They build on the ‘Learning Bricks’ which are sent out at the start of each term which give an overview of the learning for that term.
English – Our English approach starts with quality texts and learning how to become better readers and writers from them. Our English leaders have chosen units and high quality, challenging yet thought provoking texts to engage children in the learning process to ensure that, across the school year, children are exposed to a range of genres, issues and styles of writing. Each unit starts with a ‘hook’ to engage the learners. Across the unit, the children build their writing skills and vocabulary. They draft, edit and improve their writing to build a final piece which will be ‘published’ therefore encouraging writing for a purpose and audience.
Phonics – In Early Years and KS1, the school follows the Bug Club phonics programme for teaching and assessment. This starts in pre-school and continued, if needed, in LKS2, if the children do not reach the expected level.
Quality texts and reading – Every class has a class novel (chosen in conjunction with our English leads) which is a chance for children to enjoy being read to by an adult. To help promote and embed a love of reading, children also enjoy dedicated daily time to read to themselves and enjoy their own novel, poetry or non-fiction books. All children benefit from reading 3 or 4 times a week with an adult at home and we use Boom Reader to record these.
AR – We are an Accelerated Reader school. Accelerated Reader is an assessment and monitoring system that helps the children in KS2 to read books at their level and tests their comprehension of the book they have just read.
Maths – We follow the White Rose maths scheme in school and supplement this with arithmetic skills and daily retrieval practice.