Intent

At Bournes Green Infant School our aim is to develop a lifelong love of learning. Our curriculum is designed to promote mastery and a depth of understanding. It prepares pupils for life beyond and after school through our focus on mastery and The Learning Powers. We model, encourage and reward children for displaying the powers of curiosity, perseverance, imagination, improvement, enthusiasm, concentration, cooperation and effort. Our Learning Powers are woven throughout our curriculum. We focus on the enjoyment and journey of learning rather than just the outcome.

Implementation

Our curriculum is based on the National Curriculum. It is coherently planned and sequenced towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning. Our curriculum is designed to reflect the local area, the community we serve and the needs of the children. Where possible, our curriculum ensures that links are made to reading and writing; opportunities to link learning to other subjects is capitalised on. We place a high emphasis on ensuring that our children develop a firm and secure knowledge and understanding of the basic skills of reading, writing and maths. We strongly believe that having a wide and varied vocabulary is fundamentally important and therefore we ensure that vocabulary development is planned, taught and applied accurately. These skills are essential in ensuring that our children have firm foundations which are built upon and embedded throughout the Bournes Green journey. We use the Collins Big Cat Phonics for Letters and Sounds reading scheme to ensure that reading books are closely aligned to the children’s phonic knowledge.  Alongside their scheme book the children are encouraged to experience a range of genres and texts and develop a love of reading. Our phonics teaching is based on the New Revised Little Wandle Letters and Sounds which is a systematic synthetic phonics programme. The scheme is adapted to ensure it meets the needs of all learners. Our children have a wide range of memorable and fun learning experiences. We want learning to be magical and this evident in our unique and immersive library. Our curriculum is enhanced with experiences beyond the National Curriculum with the inclusion of outdoor learning sessions, swimming lessons, enrichment activities, educational visits and opportunities to attend extra-curricular clubs.

Impact

Our children leave the Infant School well prepared for the next stage of their education. They have a good academic knowledge and have developed the knowledge and skills to enable them to be successful learners. Our children have a thirst for learning and take pride in their achievements. They have a good understanding of how to make a positive contribution to the school community and have an age appropriate understanding of what it means to be a good citizen.

Reception Curriculum

In Reception, we follow the Early Years Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage. This Framework sets out the requirement for learning and development in the Early Years and provides specific and prime areas of learning which we must cover in our curriculum.  

These areas are:

• Personal, Social and Emotional Development
• Physical Development
• Communication and Language development
• Literacy
• Mathematics
• Understanding the World
• Expressive Arts and Design

To find out further information please contact the school office or speak to your child’s class teacher.

Our curriculum maps and more information regarding our approach to the teaching of reading can be found below: