Elton Primary School & Nursery 'Love Learning, Love Life, Always Aiming High'

Curriculum

Love learning, love life, always aiming high

The school’s overall intention is that the curriculum teaches our children to love learning, love life and always aim high. Using the national curriculum as a starting point, at Elton Primary our curriculum aims to ensure we focus on the following skills and knowledge that we believe are key for our children to achieve that intention:

To be able to confidently and creatively express themselves artistically, mathematically, digitally, verbally and in written format.

To have respect for themselves and others; and empathy for issues people face both locally and globally.

To be healthy: to understand the importance of mental and physical health and to know how to stay healthy.

Resilience: we want to develop the children’s confidence to have a go, to be prepared to make mistakes, to try other approaches and not give up.

Team work skills: the ability to work with every other child from across the whole school.

Inquisitiveness: to develop a level of curiosity, to question things and develop critical thinking.

Independence: the ability to work independently at times in how they approach, research and present their work.

Engagement and enjoyment in what they are learning.

Our staff are always considering ways in which our key intentions can be developed within lessons. If you are one of our parents, you would have no doubt seen these intentions within the termly stay and learn sessions.

Other examples of the types of activities we undertake to achieve our intentions include:

We teach healthy lifestyles through the ‘mile a day’ programme, two hours of PE each week, lots of inter-school activities and clubs, the use of sports coaches in lessons and at dinner time, Christopher Winter relationship lessons, Philosophy for Children (P4C) lessons, e-safety topics and Safer Internet Day, railway safety talks…
We aim to build confidence, self-worth, respect and empathy through weekly P4C lessons which allow the children to express their opinions and respond to those of their peers.
We build teamwork through group work and by cross key stage activity days in our school teams (Dee, Delamere, Beeston and Manley) such as on Safer Internet Day, World Book Day and during our Plastic Project.
We aim to engage and enrich all our children’s lives by building in opportunities for visits to places such as the Chester Zoo, STEM festivals, Lego programming at the science park, by working with artists such as on the poppy display, by watching live performances – Castaway, pantomimes etc.
We aim to develop respect and empathy through spiritual, moral, social and cultural aspects of the children’s lives by working with the church, having Reverend Ruth and Friends in for bible assemblies, P4C discussions, through art projects with AgeUKCheshire...
We aim to give children access to technology through iPads, PCs, laptops and IWB – allowing them to explore ideas through coding and multimedia presentations.
We enrich our curriculum by utilising expert skills in areas like French, DT, PE, computing and outdoor learning.
We aim to develop global awareness of issues by undertaking whole school projects such as the Zoo Project and Plastic Project.

Curriculum Sequencing

If you look at the curriculum overviews, you will see how we map our curriculum across each year group and within each subject. The ordering of our topics have changed in 2019 to match the themes of our literacy texts following the Pathways To Write literacy scheme. Teachers also create half-termly learning leaflets detailing what areas are being covered each half-term: these can be found on the website.

You can investigate how we sequence our curriculum by looking the overviews. For several subjects we follow schemes: