Curriculum Overview

At Bushbury Lane Academy, we believe that one of our fundamental tasks is to teach our children to speak clearly and articulately and to read and write effectively. Reading across all curriculum areas is a priority to extend and deepen pupils understanding and use of vocabulary. We want pupils to develop a love of reading during their time at our school and be exposed to a range of classic and contemporary literature. The use of class shared texts during Guided Reading, our class reading spines and our reading library bus has supported us in increasing the profile of reading across the school and immerse our pupils in books and language.

 

Maths at Bushbury Lane Academy is taught through Maths no problem and aims to build pupil’s mathematical fluency as well as provide learners with the mathematical thinking to solve challenging problems. The program is progressive and allows learners to recap and build on their learning over time, taking into account the concrete, pictorial and abstract approach to understanding mathematical concepts. Our maths lessons embed a clear structure that takes children on a learning journey and enables all learners to make progress and meet their potential by navigating through practicing, applying, reasoning and greater depth challenges.

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We follow the National Curriculum, which is covered in full through a range of Knowledge Rich Projects. These projects cover a range of subjects including Science, History, Geography, Art and Design Technology. Some subjects (English, Maths, Music, Computing, French, PSHE, PE and RE) are taught outside of these projects but teachers make cross curricular links with these where possible. Subjects within our curriculum are carefully sequenced to ensure that knowledge and skills and built upon throughout key stages and year groups. 

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In addition to this, to raise aspirations and equip children with a real belief that they can achieve anything if they are prepared to work hard, it is imperative that we prioritise experiential learning within our curriculum. Throughout the year, we embed theme days and weeks into the curriculum to enable children to be fully immersed in subjects and topics and to gain practical, hands on experiences in a range of ways.

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Every teacher plans engaging learning opportunities to meet the needs of their class. The delivery of the learning is based on clear and consistent structure, which focuses on recall and retrieval for retention, application of knowledge and skills as well as focus on the teaching and acquisition of new vocabulary. The design of the structure of each lesson is aligned with the children’s needs- their starting points and the cognitive learning demands of what is being taught is considered at the planning and delivery stage of each lesson. We use knowledge organisers (a set of key facts or information that pupils need to know and be able to recall in order to master a unit or topic) and make them available to the children during each adventure. This way, we help our pupils remember what they are learning and see the bigger learning journey in their subjects. Instead of forgetting previous learning, pupils continually revisit and retrieve prior learning from their memories; teachers enable them to do this by using questioning and the use of revision and recap to reignite learning during lessons.

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At Bushbury Lane Academy, we use the following schemes of work to support with curriculum planning:

• Maths No Problem (Maths)

• Cornerstones Maestro (Foundation subjects)

• Cornerstones Love to Celebrate (R.E)

• Read Write Inc (Phonics and Spelling)

• Jigsaw (PSHE)

• Charanga (Music)

• Purple Mash (Computing)

• Nelsons Handwriting (Handwriting)