Core Subjects
Long Term Curriculum Overview
English
At GV Primary School, reading is at the heart of all that we do. We encourage and support all children to read a variety of genres and authors in order that they become lifelong, avid readers and use adventurous vocabulary in their speech and their written work. We follow the phonics Bug Club by ActiveLearn Phonics scheme which we use to build children's speaking and listening skills in their own right as well as to prepare children for learning to read by developing their phonic knowledge and skills. We celebrate children’s enjoyment of books and reading by dedicating various areas around school to spaces where children can read comfortably and happily. As spoken language underpins the development of reading and writing, we aim to foster exploratory talk and good listening skills. Drama and role-play is regularly used in lessons to encourage creativity in writing. We adapt a talk less teaching approach whereby children develop their spoken language in order to enhance their written skills and we have adapted the ‘Word Aware’ approach to ensure that our classrooms are vocabulary rich and enthuse the children to make ambitious vocabulary choices when writing. Children are curious about new vocabulary and are keen to develop their understanding of words that they are not familiar with. We have developed our curriculum to incorporate good quality and engaging texts that interest and inspire readers. We would like GV Primary children to be ambitious, resilient and creative writers with an innate desire to read for pleasure. We use our cross-curricular topics to provide a platform for talk and deliver enriched activities for writing. Application of key literacy skills are therefore taught across all foundation subjects. Writing is celebrated and displayed in classrooms and around the school and rewards for taking pride in handwriting and presentation are given weekly.
Maths
At Grove Vale, we follow a Mastery approach which is personalised to the core values of our school. As per the NCETM, mastering maths means pupils acquiring a deep, long-term, secure and adaptable understanding of the subject. The phrase ‘teaching for mastery’ describes the elements of classroom practice and school organisation of the curriculum that combine to give pupils the best chances of mastering maths
Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract
The Concrete Pictorial Abstract (CPA) approach is a system of learning that uses physical and visual aids to build a child’s understanding of abstract topics.
Pupils are introduced to a new mathematical concept through the use of concrete resources (e.g. fruit, Dienes blocks etc). When they are comfortable solving problems with physical aids, they are given problems with pictures – usually pictorial representationsof the concrete objects they were using.
Then they are asked to solve problems where they only have the abstract i.e. numbers or other symbols. Building these steps across a lesson can help pupils better understand the relationship between numbers and the real world, and therefore helps secure their understanding of the mathematical concept they are learning.
At Grove Vale we aim to inspire all children to reach their full academic potential. In mathematics this means ensuring an ambitious curriculum that is fully inclusive of all children which:
- Ensures children at Grove Vale are emerged in a rich and high-quality math curriculum, enabling freedom to be creative.
- Gives children the chance to develop the power of resilience by believing in themselves when being faced with mathematical challenges.
- Encourages children have opportunities to be curious, making connections between mathematical processes and the world around them.
- Develops children as independent learners, having self-drive to be ambitious by being a part of progressing and challenging themselves and not being afraid to take risks.
- Makes sure fluency, problem solving and reasoning is developed sequentially to ensure children have a strong foundation to build upon and achieve mastery.
Click here for more information on our Maths page
Science
At Grove Vale we aim to give the children knowledge of the world around them that they can then go on and apply through practical activities which develop their knowledge alongside their investigative skills. We encourage a desire for the children to find out more about the world they live in. We study living things, materials and states of matter, light, forces, sound, electricity and earth and space. We want the children to discover, investigate, ask questions, observe, collaborate, predict, investigate and conclude. It is important to us that children are able to use correct and appropriate scientific vocabulary to explain what they observe.
Our core values underpin everything we teach during science lessons. The children are resilient in science by developing strong problem-solving abilities to tackle research obstacles and experimental failures and understand that progress in science often involves encountering failures and setbacks. They are ambitious by being inspired to learn from the work of scientists through discussion and reading. They are encouraged to push themselves out of their comfort zone by tackling ambitious research and investigations. They make an active contribution in lessons and take pride in their work. The children show curiosity by becoming curious about how the world around them works. They are excited by new learning and ask thought provoking questions in science. They devise their own lines of enquiry and make links between concepts. Finally, they are creative when making links between concepts and present their learning in a variety of ways. They think ‘outside of the box’ when drawing conclusions and articulate themselves confidently.
