Our Key Stage 2 continues to build upon the firm foundations set in EYFS and KS1, equipping our children with the skills and knowledge to be confident at secondary school and develop the responsibilities and experiences to be successful in life.
Within our English curriculum, we aim to provide our children with integral skills that will allow children to confidently produce and interpret the English Language. The continued development of oracy skills from Key Stage 1 will advance into Key Stage 2 and link closely to writing.
The importance of speaking to an audience and presenting work confidently to others, participating in debates and listening, understanding and then responding to others’ points of view are all vital skills for pupils to develop for future use. At Holyhead Primary Academy, these are skills that we will make provision for in our curriculum.
In Key Stage 2 we use increasingly difficult texts in class with more focus on teaching inference and high order reading skills.
At Holyhead we bring greater coherence to the writing curriculum by focusing on fewer aspects of writing but in greater depth. We have identified some common writing strands that run through each theme and we have grouped some text types together; such as ‘Newspaper Writing and Explanation’, and ‘Speech and Formal Letter Writing’. Pupils then have multiple chances to apply their skills through the many incidental writing opportunities embedded through the themes. In Key Stage 2, pupils are introduced to new purposes for writing as they learn to ‘Write to Persuade’ and in Upper KS2, ‘Write to Discuss’.
Our aim is to equip all pupils with the skills and confidence to become fluent in the fundamentals of Mathematics, to reason mathematically and have the ability to solve increasingly sophisticated problems as outlined in the 2014 National Curriculum programmes of study.
We aim to increase confidence and deepen understanding in KS2 with an emphasis on building a solid foundation for all pupils before moving on. Our curriculum is designed to allow pupils to learn concepts in greater depth (mastery approach). This means designing sequences of lessons that enable pupils to demonstrate not just that they have superficial knowledge of a concept, but that they can apply their knowledge to increasingly complex situations and can make rich links between different curriculum areas.
Children’s understanding in mathematics is strengthened if they experience concrete and visual representations of a concept during a lesson. Children across Key Stage 2 will continue to use a variety of equipment such as counters, multilink, dienes equipment and number rods to help introduce new concepts (such as ratio and scaling) and to show their understanding of different concepts. They will also use a variety of visual representations such as bar models and diagrams in increasingly complex ways.
Pupils will need to be independent problem solvers when they learn. They will need to be creative and confident in presenting their reasoning and ideas to others. They will need to know where they are with their learning and what they need to do next to improve their work.
We also recognise that spending a short time every day on rapid recall of number facts, such as basic number bonds to five or ten and times table facts, quickly leads to improved fluency. This is not meaningless rote learning; rather, this is an important step to developing understanding through identifying patterns and relationships between the tables (for example, that the products in the 4× table are double the products in the 2× table).
We have a 3 tiered approach to the delivery of Science.
Science knowledge is delivered through the themes, some of which are specifically science focussed such as ‘All stars’ and ‘Galaxy Quest’, but also has an extra emphasis of practical science through weekly additional lessons based on Cornerstones’ ‘Love to Investigate’ scheme. These investigations are linked to the themes and develop the skills and vocabulary they need to work independently and with an enquiry-based approach.
We ensure coverage of the science programme of study across each year group for both the knowledge aspects of science as well as practical investigation types.
In Key Stage 2 our themes continue to offer irresistible learning opportunities through innovative and rich experiences.
A theme lasts up to half a term, which the pupils use as a hook to base their learning on. The underpinning philosophy is that they learn better in context than in isolation.
Themes cover areas of the National Curriculum, but some themes might be more geography based, while others may contain more drama. By writing the curriculum in this way it allows for stronger experiences and more time to produce high-quality outcomes with more learning impact. In this way there is an opportunity for in-depth learning but with the full curriculum balance across the age phases.
Themes have within them certain key activities and outcomes with many opportunities for pupils to have a real audience. For example, a large piece of extended writing such as a piece of diary writing in the ‘A portrait in time’ theme shared with a global audience via an online blog or a recipe in ‘Merlin’ that is published and ‘sold’ to families, allows time for developing reading and writing, as well as a wide variety of other key skills that the pupils will develop. The theme ‘Framed’ in year 6 allows pupils to produce a ‘real’ gallery exhibition that is ‘visited’ by families and the community.
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