Whitmore Park Primary School

Curriculum (ID 1016)

• English
  English

  At Whitmore Park, we believe reading, writing and communication create the foundation for children’s learning. The English curriculum is centred around high-quality literature to enable pupils to broaden their vocabulary as well as open their minds to new cultures and experiences, helping to foster a love for language and literature and give the children the tools to be life-long learners. In our curriculum, reading is a priority and we endeavour to support children to become fluent and confident readers. We provide pupils with quality examples of writing in order to inspire their own work so they can develop their own style and voice as they draw upon what they have read. We want to provide a rich and engaging English curriculum that not only equips pupils with essential literacy skills, but also inspires creativity and passion. Our ultimate aim is to ensure that all pupils, regardless of background or ability, develop a strong command of the English language, enabling them to communicate effectively with both spoken and written language; think critically about authors’ writing and their own and access a wide range of texts with confidence and understanding.

• Maths
  Maths

  At Whitmore Park, we believe a deep and broad understanding of mathematics is essential for our pupils in their everyday lives. We equip pupils with an appreciation for the simplicity, power and beauty of mathematics whilst developing in them a sense of curiosity and enjoyment for the subject. To ensure this, we not only design our curriculum to meet the aims required by the National Curriculum, but also employ and utilise the NCETM’s research derived ‘Five Big Ideas’. These underpin the teaching and facilitation of mastery within our classrooms with at least one principle incorporated within every maths lesson delivered.

• Science
  Science

  Science teaching at Whitmore Park Primary School aims to give all children a strong understanding of the world around them, whilst acquiring specific skills and knowledge to help them to think scientifically. This then impacts each child by ensuring they gain an understanding of scientific processes and an understanding of how science is used today as well as how it could be used in the future. The intent of Whitmore Park’s Science curriculum is to instil a lifelong love for scientific enquiry and discovery, fostering curiosity and critical thinking skills among our pupils. Our aim is to provide a broad and balanced Science curriculum that inspires and engages all learners, regardless of their background and ability.

• Geography
  Geography

  The intent of the Geography curriculum at Whitmore Park has been designed and constructed to ignite curiosity and fascination for The World and promote diversity of people and places. It enables our children to be enriched with both procedural and declarative knowledge alongside developing lifelong skills. It ensures our pupils have cultural capital and become educated citizens of the world. It allows our pupils to become competent with a wide range of geographical skills and to gain and deepen their long-term geographical knowledge of the local area. It offers first hand observations and fieldwork pertinent to them. We follow the ‘Understanding the World’ framework for the EYFS and the National Curriculum for KS1 and KS2. We combine fieldwork and secondary geography sources to deepen their understanding of the earth’s key physical and human processes, the environments and landscapes.

• History
  History

  The intent of the History curriculum at Whitmore Park Primary School is to provide a rich and engaging historical education that inspires pupils’ curiosity about the past, develops their understanding of chronology, and helps them to make connections between historical events, people, and periods. Our intent is to foster a love for learning history, promote cultural understanding, and instill a sense of local and global citizenship among our pupils. We aim to ensure that our pupils acquire a solid foundation of historical knowledge and key historical skills that will equip them for future learning and enable them to become informed and critical thinkers about the past. We follow the ‘Understanding the World’ framework for the EYFS and the National Curriculum for KS1 and KS2. We ensure that the curriculum provides opportunities for our children to learn about the history and heritage of Coventry which helps them to develop a sense of their culturally diverse community.

• Art
  Art

  At Whitmore Park Primary School, we value art and design as an important part of the children’s entitlement toa broad a balanced curriculum. Our children will be taught art and design in a way that ensures progression of skills, following a sequence that builds on previous learning. Our children will gain experience and skills of a wide range of formal elements of art in a way that will enhance their learning opportunities, enabling them to use their art and design across a range of subjects to be creative and solve problems, ensuring they make progress.

• Music
  Music

  At Whitmore Park we have developed Music to being taught by class teachers over the last few years. This is after transitioning from a Music specialist teacher, who delivered the music lessons to the whole school. We follow the Charanga Music Scheme as this provides staff with the resources and declarative knowledge they need to deliver the lessons. Each unit of work is six weeks long and focuses on clear progression and key skills. The children listen and appraise a focus song for that unit and learn to sing it, they explore other songs within the same genre and have the opportunity to listen, appraise and compare them to the focus song. They move on to learning the song on an instrument (KS1 chime bars, LKS2 glockenspiels and UKS2 keyboards), using rhythm grids to support improvisation skills, improvising to the song and then composing their own versions of the song as a class. The children then perform the song at the end of the unit.