The Cobbs Infant and Nursery School

As a school we base our learning on a broad and balanced curriculum and strive to deliver a wide and varied learning experience. The curriculum is designed to: recognise children’s prior learning, provide first-hand learning experiences, build resilience and develop inquisitive minds. We make good use of our varied and well developed school grounds and our local area ensuring it is used for many different learning opportunities. Our curriculum is further enriched by carefully selected visits, visitors and engaging extra-curricular experiences, which often bring to life aspects of PSHE for our children.

Key Stage 1 Curriculum

In Key Stage 1 we have used a ‘learning challenge’ concept for planning, which leads to the children’s active involvement in their learning and keeps their learning experiences meaningful. We have designed our challenge curriculum to effectively build on and use our rich locality and the experiences and interests of our children, ensuring learning is engaging and relevant to their lives.

We make sure that the National Curriculum is taught in full as well as additional aspects of the curriculum that we feel are important to our children and the context of our school and current events more widely. We plan first hand experiences wherever possible, making use of a wealth of local visits and visitors so that children are able to learn from shared experiences that bring the curriculum to life.

We plan carefully for the core subjects of Mathematics, English and Science. These subjects are taught discretely but also through our cross curricular challenge curriculum approach. All opportunities to extend pupils’ reading, writing and mathematical skills are taken through other subjects. The foundation subjects of History, Geography, Art and Design, Design and Technology are taught mainly through our topics, with Music, PE and RE taught discretely with links being made wherever possible. Subjects are creatively linked and teachers present exciting activities which fire pupils’ imaginations. Topics are question led and usually have a scientific, geographical or historical main focus with the arts subjects threading into these. Discrete opportunities for PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) and SMSC (Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Education) are also identified and taught. We teach learning behaviours which encourage children to be effective, independent, thoughtful and team learners. Classes, groups and individuals work on identified Learning Behaviour targets such as knowing how to improve their work and listening to the contribution of others. These are an integral part of each lesson enabling children to develop learning skills for life that are applicable to every subject. The children also begin to learn some French such as greetings, simple vocabulary and songs. Teachers deliver our curriculum thoughtfully, utilising different teaching strategies including cooperative learning, which ensure maximum active pupil involvement during lessons. They plan for frequent opportunities for problem solving and skills development.

Time is carefully allocated to ensure that the full curriculum is taught systematically over a year. The curriculum is fully differentiated to meet the needs of all children, with additional support provided for some children including the most able and talented where appropriate to their needs. 

Teachers plan within year teams. They create long term plans to ensure full coverage, then medium term plans from which lesson plans are created. Assessment for Learning is actively used by staff and children. Formal teacher assessments take place termly and children’s progress is tracked and analysed in detail with interventions taking place as and when necessary. In this way we ensure that all children are receiving personalised learning.

For further details of our creative curriculum please click on the links to the documents below.

Reading

In our school we believe in teaching the children a range of strategies and skills that focus on reading for meaning and creating readers for life. Therefore we offer our children a wide range of high quality books that are drawn from many schemes and ‘real’ books. Books are organized by the nationally recognized Book Banding system to ensure that children are reading at an appropriate level. These include a range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry books.

We use bench marking materials together with the characteristics of the book bands to assess children and ensure that they are reading within the right book band.

Children have many opportunities to develop their reading skills throughout the day. These include shared reading during lessons, small group guided reading sessions together with individual reading opportunities. We also recognize and value the importance of story time where the children learn to appreciate books and stories beyond their level of independent reading.

For more details on our teaching of reading and phonics please see the English section.

For further details of our teaching and learning for specific subjects please see individual subject information within the Curriculum section.

Assessment at Key Stage 1

End of Year Expectations

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