Love of Learning

Aspiration

Resilience

Knowledge

At Larkspur our curriculum has been carefully designed for our pupils and their community. We want pupils to leave Larkspur with a love of learning, a thirst for knowledge and be ready for the next stage in their education.

Pupils will become resilient learners, who understand that making mistakes is a valuable part of the learning process and that working hard will enable them to achieve.

This underpins our school values and growth mindset beliefs. We want our pupils to realise their potential, respect differences and go out into the world as successful citizens.

To ensure this our school drivers for our children are: Vocabulary, Personal development and Cultural Capital.

Schemes

To develop children’s reading and spelling skills, we use a systematic, synthetic phonics programme in Early Years and Key Stage 1. We use the scheme ‘Little Wandle letters and sounds revised’. This scheme provides a consistent approach across all classes and ‘keep up’ (intervention) groups.

We also ensure that children read every day in all classes and, in Year One (and for the children who are not age related in reading, in Year Two) we provide reading groups. The children are streamed into ability groups and read a book which is matched to their phonic ability. They will read the same book 3 times – on three consecutive days. Once for decoding, once for initiation (building fluency and expression) and once for comprehension.

Our writing curriculum follows The Write Stuff programme that is linked to the National curriculum statements, ensuring the different writing genres and grammar elements are met.

‘Maths No Problem’ (linked to the National Curriculum) is the starting point for all planning in KS1 and KS2 and enables children to develop mastery in maths. Early Years use the ‘Maths No Problem’ approach to support the EYFS mathematics curriculum.

We teach BSL (British sign language) from years 1 to 6.

History and geography is planned from the cross-curricular ‘Primary Connected’ Collins Scheme.

The resource ‘KAPOW’ is used to teach PSHCE including RSE, computing, art design, design technology and music in all years.

Our teachers teach children musical skills using the ‘KAPOW’ scheme and they have focused singing assemblies every week.

For Religious Education we follow Discovery RE which is an enquiry-based scheme for 3-11 year olds. The scheme fosters our growth mindset principles and enables the children to become ‘critical thinkers’.

It is important that children learn a range of PE skills, and they therefore have lessons in dance, gymnastics, sports and games, as well as swimming in year 5 and 6.

We extend the sports curriculum by offering after school clubs and focus sports events.

Curriculum overviews are created, detailing the topics and progression of skills across the academic year for each year group.

Please visit the Curriculum Overviews page to view these alongside the progression of skills documents.

• Under ‘Our learning’

Assessment

Assessment lies at the heart of promoting children’s learning. It provides a framework for setting targets, planning work and for monitoring and communicating children’s progress. Our learning culture, based around Growth Mindset and Learning to Learn, plus the use of Formative Assessment and Fast Feedback strategies, enables assessment to be carried out in partnership with children and supports pupil attainment and progression. 

Progress is assessed against age-related expectations at the end of each key stage as set out in the 2014 National Curriculum for KS1 and KS2 and in the Early Years Foundation Stage assessment arrangements.