Curriculum

Our Juicy Curriculum

At Yattendon our staff have a passion for a creative curriculum which is rich, demanding and develops the imagination through the creative use of media and materials. 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. A very important vehicle to implement this cross-curricular approach is English. Relevant skills are taken from the Literacy Strategy and given a meaningful context through the topic and learning is enhanced and enriched. This happens in Science and Computing and to a lesser extent in Maths and requires detailed but flexible planning and a whole school approach so that important work is shared out and revisited.
 
We are very proud of our Curriculum. We believe that our Topics make 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.  Please see year group pages for further information.