NB: For the SRE curriculum, click above. For the rest of the curriculum, click on the appropriate year group below. Further information about the design of our curriculum can found below the Year Group links.

 

Our Knowledge-Rich Curriculum

 

At Yattendon our staff have a passion for a creative, knowledge-rich curriculum which is demanding and develops the imagination through the systematic delivery of a sequential and inspiring curriculum. We believe that this is the key to motivation in learning and the growth of children's self esteem and enjoyment and their success as learners. The curriculum is the means of developing our vision and ethos of the school and helps generate a strong sense of team work and creativity in everyone.
 
At Yattendon our curriculum is designed to give cohesion, meaning and motivation, developing the commitment, curiosity and creativity of each child. This has been done by linking the learning experience into a meaningful whole. A thematic approach stitches together the individual subjects of the National Curriculum into a ‘seamless coat of learning’. It makes everything related and relevant and enables...

• Learning in a meaningful context and allows for first hand experience and concentrates on the depth and breadth of the curriculum. 
• Links to be made and ensures that children apply knowledge and skills learned in one area to others, thus reinforcing learning and increasing understanding and confidence 
• Effective coverage of the National Curriculum and makes good use of longer blocks of time, enabling sustained work on themes covering more than one subject
• Team work and detailed cross-curricular planning and promotes shared vision and consistency
• Creativity in learning and encourages flexibility and the development of exciting learning opportunities through different teaching techniques and strategies, making learning vivid and real.

 

To fulfil our aims of integration and creativity we have developed a curriculum model based on termly topics or themes for each year group. These have been chosen to link in with the National Curriculum and act as titles to hang the programmes of study and learning objectives for all the different subjects which have been carefully allocated to the topics to ensure good coverage. Each term has a main focus taken from the Foundation Subjects to promote a broad and balanced curriculum and nearly all the learning will relate in some way to the topic.
 
We are very proud of our Curriculum. We believe that linking knowledge and understanding makes learning fun and that if a child is motivated and challenged they are more likely to succeed. We design learning experiences with a strong narrative that makes what the children do relevant to them.  If you would like more information about our curriculum than is available on our website, please contact your child's class teacher or their year group leader.  Please see the year group links for further information.
 

English at Yattendon

English

Our vision for Yattendon is to deliver a high quality English curriculum which fosters a love of reading, writing and discussion and provides our pupils with the tools they need to participate fully in the real world.  We want all pupils to be confident and competent in reading, writing and spoken language skills which they can successfully apply in their everyday life.

 

We want our pupils to speak clearly, to convey their ideas fluently and confidently and to ask questions.  We value the importance of using quality texts as a focus of our English teaching and we strive to create life-long readers, encouraging the pupils to read for pleasure and to read widely.  Our engaging curriculum provides a range of opportunities for writing for purpose and audience and focuses on the whole writing process - planning, drafting, editing and publishing to develop proficiency in writing and pupils who regard themselves as authors. 

 

Reading

Our vision at Yattendon is to equip our pupils with the essential life skill of reading, to know that we read for meaning, that it has a purpose, and to promote a love of books.

Reading lessons are centred around a carefully selected text which aims to challenge all pupils. Within the reading lessons the pupils are taught to retrieve, infer, predict, sequence and analyse key vocabulary in the text. These skills equip the pupils with the comprehension skills they need to enjoy stories and become lifelong readers. 

 

Throughout the school, we ensure that all pupils are exposed to a wealth of high-quality literature. Every class has opportunities to visit our magnificent school library and we promote high quality texts from a range of different cultures using our Reading Ambassadors.

 

 

Phonics

At Yattendon we use the programme Read, Write Inc. Phonics.  Read Write Inc Phonics, is a highly successful literacy programme created by Ruth Miskin and published by Oxford University Press.

The Read Write Inc. programme is carefully matched to the national curriculum, giving our pupils an excellent start with their literacy skills. The programme supports all pupils to become fluent readers, confident speakers and willing writers.  It is also used to teach early reading and writing skills.  It integrates phonics with comprehension, writing, grammar, spelling and handwriting.  The programme ensure phonics teaching is effective and pupils meet high expectations.

 

Writing

We aim to give our writers regular opportunities for writing within every English unit:

Imitation

During the imitation stage, pupils get to know a text really well by orally learning it, exploring it through drama and then reading it to build a bank of vocabulary and useful writing tools to use in their own writing.

 

Skills Development

Within this section of our English units, we teach the skills which will allow our young writers to flourish.  Children are taught explicit grammar, punctuation and spellings which are embedded into planning. Children understand grammatical terms, can use a variety of grammatical techniques in their own writing and discuss the impact of their choices. Our vision is for all our pupils to be confident writers across the curriculum.

 

Innovation

The Innovation stage is grounded in the processes of shared writing, with a strong and systematic focus on securing the basics of handwriting, phonics/spelling. The pupils are given the opportunity to be creative and apply their own ideas to the text type that is being taught. Children produce their best piece of writing during this stage and we proudly celebrate our pupils’ achievements.

Mathematics at Yattendon School

At Yattendon School, we use White Rose Maths to plan and teach our lessons and frame our teaching within the ‘Mastery Model’.  This means we scaffold learning for all pupils and spend time enriching learning and understanding rather than accelerating too quickly through learning.

A yearly overview for each year group suggests the teaching time needed for every block of learning. The Autumn, Spring and Summer sections are split equally into 12 weeks comprising 11 weeks of blocks followed by a week of consolidation.

Because the Autumn term often exceeds 12 weeks, teachers might choose to spend longer on the Autumn topics to fully embed them.

The termly overviews show the objectives for each block. These objectives derive directly from the National Curriculum. Where an objective includes bold and underlined text, only the bold and underlined part of the objective is covered in the block; the rest of the objective is covered elsewhere within the scheme.

The objectives in each block are broken down into a series of carefully planned small steps. Teachers teach the content in the suggested order as the step sequence is designed to gradually develop children’s understanding.

As highlighted in the National Curriculum, all children must be able to access fluency, reasoning and problem solving. It’s therefore essential that we as teachers provide the support needed for every child to reason and problem solve.

 

For a more detailed breakdown of your child's learning objectives please click on the following link: 

https://whiterosemaths.com/resources/schemes-of-learning/primary-sols/