Curriculum

Our Curriculum

What does your child learn at school each day?

Click on the links below to find out more about the curriculum subjects and the topics being studied by each year group.

We ensure high quality learning environments for all children at the school. Our overall curriculum supports progression through a series of lessons in each subject that excite and challenge.

We aim to ignite pupils' interest with our range of resources and starting points that often link to trips, visitors to school, famous books, and historical events.

In English our resources are  selected for their appropriateness to the task in hand.  This often includes, extracts of text, visual or audio excerpts and lots of discussion work.  Reading and writing tasks in English often link to other areas of the curriculum. We follow Jolly Phonics and Letters and Sounds for our phonics programmes. 

In Maths, we use 'White Rose' as the 'backbone' of our learning and are developing a 'Mastery' approach that is highly inclusive  allowing all pupils to achieve well in maths (Click on the link below for more information on the mastery approach).  This is supplemented by a variety of practical and work book resources building on resources provided by the 'Power Maths' scheme. 

https://www.ncetm.org.uk/resources/50042

In recent years we have successfully updated our computing and digital technologies with all pupils accessing state of the art technologies within school. This includes supporting software such as 'Purple Mash' and Mathletics.

Our Early Years resources are constantly updated but the outdoor classroom benefitted from considerable investment this year.

The Early Years curriculum is summarised below in our long term plan:

Reading

Reading is a high priority for all our children, whatever their age or ability.  We want our children to develop a love of reading that will sustain them for a lifetime in their learning and work, and in their leisure time.  We encourage parents and carers to read to children as often as possible because this will help them nurture a love and understanding of reading.

Did you know that you are your first and most influential teacher?

We encourage an appreciation of different kinds of stories and poems from many countries and cultures.  We encourage children to read non-fiction of all kinds for information and research.

Teachers continuously assess the children's progress in reading, often through 'guided' reading in small groups.  Our books are colour coded according to difficulty and the teacher will tell children which colour band they should choose from. There are lots of new books this year to encourage excitement over reading.  We have a large stock of ungraded books that children bring home to share with parents rather than read to parents. 

Year 3 class will bring home a book in a pack as part of our Better Reading Scheme and this is for parents to spend quality time every evening modelling reading to their children.  The pack also contains a set of questions for parents to ask their children to aid development of comprehension skills.

Home-School Partnership

We believe that education is a partnership between home and school and that a good relationship with parents will help us to make our school better.  The support and encouragement of parents helps us to raise standards of achievement and promote positive attitudes and behaviour.  Parents are invited to sign our Home-School Agreement, which sets out our commitment to Larkrise children and parents and what they can do to help their children while they are part of the Larkrise community.

Religious Education

RE is based on the Essex scheme of work.  RE teaching is mainly Christian but children learn about most of the world's major religions.  This helps Larkrise children to develop tolerance and respect for all people.  There is also an emphasis on developing children's spirituality.

Parents are entitled to withdraw their children from daily acts of collective worship (usually hymns and prayers in assemblies) and religious education in the classroom where this conflicts with their own values and beliefs.  Please discuss this with us if this is an issue for you.  Pupils withdrawn from RE engage in individual work outside the classroom.