Kingsdown & RingwouldCurriculum
Intention 1: Develop our learner’s learning.
Intention 2: Develop the character of our learners.
Intention 3: Develop the behaviours and attitudes to our learners.
Intention 4: Develop the moral compass of our learners.
Intention 1: Develop our learner’s learning.
We believe that we are not only here to develop the subject specific knowledge for the children set out by the National Curriculum, but also to help the children flourish and can have new and exciting experiences. This way, all children can reach their potential academically, physically, spiritually, and artistically.
Intention 2: Develop the character of our learners.
We use our set of curriculum and Christian values to help teach the children how to be a part of an ever-changing community and prepare them for life in the modern world. We develop our learners through an inclusive approach and ensure that all children are given the opportunity to learn in their own way.
Intention 3: Develop the behaviours and attitudes to our learners.
The attitude and behaviours for learning are incredibly important to us. By using our Habits of Mind, Growth Mindset, Nurture Principles and Thinking tools, we help the children develop a positive attitude to their learning and behaviour. We teach them how to use these as they move through the school so that they can take them into the future.
Intention 4: Develop the moral compass of our learners.
As a school routed in Christian values, we show the children how God guides us through our learning and our decision making. We do this through our Christian Values: Forgiveness, Aspirations, Interdependence, Trust, and Humility. The children understand themselves and how they can be a part of a community. The children are guided in how they can engage in the culture that they live in, as well as the cultures of others.
Implementation
Intention 1: Develop our learner’s learning.
Our curriculum will be a broad and diverse curriculum, with lots of opportunities and experiences for every child. By encouraging the children to think about what they learn, how they learn it and who they are when they are learning, we develop happy, resilient, determined, and good citizens for our community.
We will go above the National Curriculum and give the children opportunities to learn in different ways, through varied experiences. We strive to ensure that with each year they spend with us, the more opportunities they will have been given. By the end of their time with us, they will have had a varied learning experience that goes beyond the National Curriculum.
Intention 2: Develop the character of our learners.
Here at Kingsdown and Ringwould, we show and teach our children through our core Curriculum values and our Christian values. These values are discussed, taught. and shown through all areas of the curriculum and the children that can exhibit these values are celebrated each week in our Celebration assembly.
Our Curriculum Values are Independence, Communication, Resilience, Collaboration and Reflection. These curriculum values are taught explicitly through lessons and experiences in the school, with teacher’s encouraging children to show a value when they learn. These curriculum values are displayed in our school hall, reminding children of the skills they need to develop to become a successful learner and member of our school community.
Our Christian Values are Forgiveness, Aspirations, Interdependence, Trust, and Humility. These values are displayed in every classroom and lessons are used to focus on one of these values and to use stories or activities where the children can show or discuss the value.
Throughout the school, the children are asked to fill roles of responsibility to help our community. Each teacher is responsible for a Learning Team and help the children create themed days, displays and competitions.
Our Thinking Team.
Our Thinking team is a Year Six based team that encourages broader thinking from our pupils. They created a ‘Thunk Board’ where children can add their answers and ideas to ‘big’ questions each week. At the end of each week, they choose a ‘Thunker of the Week’, celebrating the ideas and thoughts of a specific children. They also monitor lessons and our learning environment to see how our Thinking Maps are used (we are an accredited Thinking School). Throughout the year, the team plan thinking activities, and competitions, where year groups are invited to take part in problem solving activities run by the Year Six pupils.
Our Spirituality Team
The focus of the team is to share ideas about how to promote a spiritual approach across the whole school. The children are very much the driving force and themes they raise are explored and developed when we plan our three annual Prayer Days in coordination with our Christian values and input/requests from our Senior Leadership Team. The role of the teacher is a supportive, administrative facilitator, with the children taking a lead role in the ideas and delivery of sessions. The team meet every other week; sometimes more frequently depending on events we are planning. Friendly, regular communication with residents in Kingsdown’s care home ‘Glendale’ has become one of our most treasured and successful tasks since starting the ‘Robins’ project. We write letters to a small group of ladies who respond, and this has fostered genuinely deep and meaningful links for both the children and staff alike.
Our Eco Team
The school's Eco Team ensure that our learning environment is looked after and that as a school, we protect the wider community for future generations. The team monitor energy use and ensure that systems are in place to eliminate unnecessary energy waste. They check that waste materials are recycled correctly. The most eco-friendly class each week are celebrated in our celebration assembly. The Eco Team suggest ways to make our school less damaging to the environment and engage parents in our initiatives. Recently, the team have involved children and parents in an initiative to walk to school where possible, in a bid to reduce pollution around the school.
Our Charity Monitors
Each year, our Year 6 children plan and present a charity that they believe we should be raising money for. This is a popular and coveted position within the school. Once voted for by the Year 6 and Year 5 children, they organise charity events to raise money for the chosen charity and help spread awareness throughout the school and the local community. The children have chosen a range of charities throughout the years, spanning global, national, and local. Charities that we have raised money for in the past have been The Paula Carr Diabetes Trust, Dementia UK, Dogs Trust, RNLI, and a school in Sri Lanka that was badly affected by the tsunami.
Our Online Safety Team
Our Online Safety Team meet once a term to discuss issues about internet safety. It is made up of two children from Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5. The team help prepare and lead Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 assemblies on Safer Internet Day each year and look for new ways to engage our parents to learn about how to keep their child/children safe online and different resources they can access. In summary, the Online Safety Team assists with the teaching of online safety across the school. The impact they could make is that their peers may listen to them more than adults and may follow advice. We are learning to stay safe, as a whole school community, and create worldwide citizens who can deal with issues that may arise from being online.
Our House Captains
At the beginning of each academic year, we inform the Year Six pupils that they can run for House Captain through a speech to our Upper Key Stage Two classes. This is a democratic approach, and the children use voting slips to cast their vote for the people they believe can help run their House Team effectively. Once elected, the House Captains are seen as role models for the rest of the school, and they take part and help run several events. They are given many responsibilities within school, such as: monitoring behaviour and celebrating excellent participation in assemblies; organising teams for academic and sporting events; supporting adults in the school.
The responsibilities that we teach the children show them the reality of being a member of a community and their role within it. The children are aware of the responsibilities that they have and take these seriously and feel proud of the important role they have in their school community.
Intention 3: Develop the behaviours and attitudes to our learners.
When the children start their learning journey here, we look for ways to develop good learning behaviours. We understand that to become a good learner, you need to know how to learn effectively. We have many different tools that help the children do this that we hope they will take into their lives beyond our school.
Our Growth Mindset approach to learning and behaving means that children develop a resilience to failure. From their start in EYFS, we teach them how to accept failure and how to move forward from it. Children are taught about ‘The Learning Pit’ and how failure helps us learn. Children help design their class learning pit and use it to remind them that stepping into new learning will be tricky, but you will always develop further by going onto that journey.
Our Curriculum Values also develop learning behaviours for our pupils.
We encourage collaboration through specific activities and praise children that show good teamwork skills.
As learners, we are constantly reflecting and thinking about how we can improve. We model this as teachers and adults, showing the children that learning never stops and that reflecting on our own learning creates learning opportunities.
We recognise that learning is hard and that sometimes failure can cause moments of self-doubt. We talk and discuss how we can become resilient learners and move forward. Through stories, activities, and class discussions, we teach the children that we always keep going and that we are determined, and we strive for new knowledge and understanding.
Communication is key for learning, and we believe we create excellent discussion topics for the children to participate in. Through challenging questions in all subjects, we nurture their curiosity and their desire to discuss their ideas and thoughts. We teach them how to discuss in a polite and kind way and how to show respect in disagreement. We model effectively how to speak to people through our teaching, how we communicate with the children and other adults.
We inspire children to work collaboratively at the school, but we understand that working independently also has its benefits. We celebrate the achievements of children that have used their learning behaviours to seek out new information on their own and develop their own learning outside of school.
The adults at our school recognise when the children are showing these learning behaviours. We award certificates to those children in our weekly celebration assembly in front of all staff and children. We explain which learning behaviour they have shown and explain how they developed this in their lessons throughout the week.
As well as this, at the end of each term we award cups to children in each curriculum area. As a staff, we deliberate on the children that have shown effort, consideration, and perseverance.
We award these cups six times a year:
- Effort per year group. This is for the child that has tried hard in all areas of the curriculum and school life and continues to impress staff with their learning behaviour.
Three times a year these cups are awarded:
- Infant and Junior Consideration cups – awarded to the children that show kindness to others.
- Art cup
- Creativity cup – awarded to the child that shows a creative way of thinking in several areas.
- ICT cup
- Maths cup
- Thinking cup – awarded to the child that shows deep thinking and wants to further their own knowledge.
- Reading cup
- Writing plate
- Science plate
- Eco cup – awarded to the child that helps our school be more eco-friendly.
- Key Stage one boys/girls’ sports cups
- Key Stage two boys/girls’ sports cups
- Languages cup
- Music cup
- Dance cup
- Humanities cup
- Perseverance cup
Intention 4: Develop the moral compass of our learners.
When planning, our teachers think not only about what the children should learn, but also how they can learn and how they can bring an understanding of morality and their knowledge of the wider world.
Class discussions are planned regularly to discuss Social and Emotional aspects of learning and we discuss topics such as: new beginnings; aspirations, friendships, changes in their life; the lives of others.
We encourage the challenge of stereotypes and plan activities to challenge the way the children perceive certain groups of people. We ensure that we identify positive role models, both within history and now.
We hold spirituality days and invite people from the community to come and teach us about our faith and deepen our understanding of our morals. We teach the faith of others and discuss similarities as well as differences.
Our charity work through our school charity changes each year from local charities to global charities. These charities are selected by children in Year 6 as part of the election process to the position of charity monitor. Each class raises money for the charity, and we hold assemblies to teach the rest of the school about what we are doing and how we are helping.
Impact
Through developing our curriculum and our learners, we hope that the impact will be clear in how balanced the children are with their learning. The impact will be evident in how the children ask questions and deepen their knowledge.
We will measure this through both formative and summative assessment, with the teacher constantly assessing the child at each stage. Pupil Progress meetings with the Head Teacher (six times a year) ensure that there is evidence of how they are developing, and we can plan structured interventions to help support children or stretch them.
Intention 1: Develop our learner’s learning.
We strive to ensure that our children’s attainment in core and foundation subjects is in line with our expectations, but we also look to help the children exceed their potential. We measure this carefully with regular pupil progress meetings with the Class Teacher and the Head Teacher. We use a range of assessment materials and ensure that we also consider Age Related Expectations and the varied starting points of the individual children. We believe that our curriculum will prepare our children to be mentally, physically, and emotionally resilient to live in modern Britain and the world.
Intention 2: Develop the character of our learners.
The impact we have on the pupils through developing their character is that they will be fully rounded individuals with clear views on friendship, trust, equality, humility, and many others. By teaching our children these complex values, we hope that they can live in our community demonstrating tolerance and respect for others. We will see this not only in their learning, but how they behave out of the classroom, in the corridors and in the playground. We see the impact we have on the children with how they interact with staff and other adults and the level of respect they show.
Intention 3: Develop the behaviours and attitudes to our learners.
The impact we see is how children will tackle their own learning and how they face challenges. They may show this on the playground, through disagreements in friendships or in a complex learning task. The impact should be that our children show resilience and don’t give up, that they are highly motivated to succeed and achieve.
Intention 4: Develop the moral compass of our learners.
Our learners will be motivated by a strong personal sense of morality. The children will make the right decisions for the right reasons and think about what are in the best interests for their community. The children will go into the world and make a positive difference in their own life and the lives of others.
