Curriculum
Our Curriculum at St Alban’s
At St Alban’s, we have created a curriculum to suit the needs of our children and build on the capital culture of our community. We aim that when our children leave in Y6, they are ready for the demands of the KS3 curriculum and prepared to succeed as a young person in today’s society. At St Alban’s we are passionate that our children have a holistic curriculum that we know, based on research, provides them with foundations for future learning, a breadth of knowledge that they can remember and use to make links and can then confidently explain or reason using all that they have learnt and experience. In response to consultation with other professionals, our children, staff and parents, we have devised a curriculum that covers the National Curriculum but is delivered in a creative and purposeful manner with pedagogies to suit our children’s learning needs and engages them actively, creatively and uses the school grounds and locality as a place to learn outdoors and thrive.
Our curriculum is split into three main groups: Core Learning, Life Learning and Essential Learning.
All of these areas are interlinked and the knowledge and skills from each area used to support learning in other areas.
Core Learning includes reading, writing, communication, maths, RE and science
Life Learning includes RE, RHE and PSHE
Essential Learning includes art and design, computing, DT, French, geography, history, music and PE
Adventures in Learning and our Mastery Approach
We teach some subjects discretely and some, where there are purposeful connections, as part of our Adventures in Learning within which we take children on mini expeditions. Our Adventures in Learning have termly whole school guiding questions linked to our ethos, Children’s Promise and Mission Statement. Throughout each academic year, the children are taken on a journey within their class of knowing and loving themselves first during Autumn Term, then loving others, including God’s gifts of nature and animals in the Spring Term and, finally how we can love our world and everything in it, to be a better place, in the Summer Term.
Autumn Term - Who am I and where do I come from?
Spring Term - How do people and out planet work together?
Summer Term - How can we love our world better?
As a Catholic School we also have an Advent and a Lenten expedition, which is faith led and provides further opportunities for enrichment, gaps teaching and personal development opportunities and at the end of each Summer Term we focus on Transition to ensure our children are well prepared for the next step in their educational careers.
Our Adventures in Learning begin with an immersion week which engages the children and prepares them for the learning in the term ahead. Then through a direct teaching model, using precise, well-structured teaching methods and varied and tailored quality resources, the children are taken on a learning journey which encourages them to develop knowledge and practice skills, and start to make links to help them remember. The teacher then skilfully questions, probes and scaffolds learning activities to deepen the understanding of children and allow them to reason and explore further through investigations, reasoning and creating, and applying their remembered knowledge and skills in a variety of ways and linking their learning across the curriculum to produce quality products at the end of their adventures in learning.
Throughout the learning process, outdoor, interactive, active and communicative lessons supported with the use of the Golden Ticket 3 ticks system, the adults, children and their peers are assessing their progress every step and children are acting on the feedback they receive, deepening their knowledge and understanding in sessions and over time.
Every lesson follows our MASTER approach to teaching and learning:
M - Motivate the children with something exciting!
A - Show them its as easy as ABC/123!
S - Rehearse the Skills and check through self, peer or adult assessment at checkpoint 1.
T - Take their learning further and ensure they are fluent. Check through self, peer or adult assessment at checkpoint 2.
E - Take their learning Even deeper! Check through self, peer or adult assessment at checkpoint 3.
R - Reflect on their learning and share experiences of mastering their skills.
To discover more about our exciting curriculum, please look at the documents and other pages below: