Our Curriculum at Soudley School
‘Respect for Ourselves, Each Other and The Environment’
Key Drivers
We have chosen the following as our key drivers for our curriculum:
Our Forest, Communication, Knowledge and Understanding of the World
Our drivers underpin our provision and curriculum. We want children to strive to reach their full potential and understand the unique and diverse heritage that surrounds them within our forest.
Click here for our Subject Leader structure: Subject Leader structure
Communication starts from EYFS and creates the foundation for our children to become successful members of the community; we want to provide children with opportunities to do this effectively in a range of ways. We want our children to have a rich knowledge of the world around them so that they able to draw upon this within school and beyond.
Curriculum Intent
UNICEF Rights of a Child Article 29
Education must develop every child’s personality, talents and abilities to the full. It must encourage the child’s respect for human rights, as well as respect for their parents, their own and other cultures and environments.
At Soudley School, we are embedding our broad, balanced curriculum which provides children with a range of learning experiences. We want our children to leave our school able to make a positive contribution to their communities and to understand the world and their place within it.
Our curriculum is based on the National Curriculum and exposes the children to the world outside of their immediate experiences.
Experiential learning and knowledge is at the core of our curriculum, with a strong focus on developing the vocabulary of every child. This links to our progression documents and our Key Drivers – Our Forest, Communication, Knowledge and Understanding of the World.
We have carefully considered and planned for how the curriculum is set out from Early Years to Year Six.
Rainbow Progress
For each appropriate foundation subject, rainbow colours show our intended progression of skills, starting with white for pre-school then going through from red to violet over the national curriculum years. This sets out an overview of our aims for that subject by the time children leave in Year 6 and you can see these in a separate tab.
Key learning by year group
For the core subjects of reading, writing and mathematics, the learning is taught in line with year group/key stage phase objectives. We have re-designed out long term curriculum from 2022 onwards, so please click on thelinks below.
2023-24 is Year B.
Please see the document below called ‘Overview of Subjects’ for details about each subject taught.
Phonics
We use Essential Letters and Sounds, which provides a systematic and consistent approach to the teaching of reading and writing. Phonics is a way of teaching children to read and write. It is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds and understand the link between the sound (phoneme) and the way it is written (grapheme).
Click here to find out more: ESSENTIAL LETTERS AND SOUNDS
Here are some videos to help with pronunciation of ‘pure’ sounds.
Children throughout Reception and Key Stage 1 take part in a daily phonics session. These focus on developing reading, writing and speaking and listening skills. The Essential Letters and Sounds programme is divided into six phases, with each phase building on the skills and knowledge of previous learning. Children are also taught to read and spell ‘harder to read words’ – words with spellings that are unusual. These include the words ‘to’, ‘was’, ‘said’ and ‘the’. ‘Harder to read’ words are ones that we can’t sound out– so these words just need to be remembered. The phonic reading books that children bring home are closely matched to the sequence of teaching.
Reading and Writing is mainly taught through literacy units based on high quality children’s books. Examples are Meerkat Mail by Emily Gravett, The Iron Man by Ted Hughes and Island of The Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell.
Maths is taught mainly through Can Do Maths and we follow a mastery approach as part of GlowMaths Hub.
R.E. We follow Gloucestershire’s Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education.
PSHE is taught through Jigsaw Curriculum and details can be seen in a separate tab.
Equality and Inclusion
We want all our children to thrive-please see our policies section for further information.
Please contact the school if you would like further information about our curriculum.