In practice, our wider curriculum is woven together through termly themes, which all our foundation subjects link to. These are based on our three core values or drivers. Subject leaders design their individual curriculum offers around these themes, whilst the Curriculum Leadership team ensure there is a clear rationale behind the sequence the units are taught in.

The required historical settings and geographical scales of the National Curriculum form the main basis for our foundation curriculum. These ignite a passion and curiosity within our children to gain knowledge and understanding of different times and places. Every year, this learning is enhanced through each year group completing an educational visit to bring their curriculum topics to life.

At Donnington Wood CE Juniors, we have developed our Science and foundation subjects curriculum to have a clear progression of both knowledge and skills throughout the school. In order to promote maximum progression, we are focused on the retention of this learning from year to year and our curriculum is centred around the research-based approach of repeated curriculum concepts.

Our curriculum team of subject leaders have developed our own knowledge-based curriculum that aims to inspire and engage our pupils, whilst enabling them to discover cross-curricular learning and build their knowledge and skills in each subject area. 

We teach Science and many of the foundation subjects in blocks, allowing a real depth of learning, engagement with resources and excellent quality outcomes.

Our curriculum concepts run as threads through our curriculum and help piece together a child’s learning through their journey with us, always working towards the bigger picture of achievement at the end of each year group or phase. Each subject has a set of concepts, which appear on all planning and displays. These are the key threads that will be referred to repeatedly throughout the school to instil these core ideas and themes within each subject

At Donnington Wood, we see every lesson as an opportunity to inspire and immerse our students in their topic. Our teachers are all subject specialists, which places them in a unique position to not only sustain the incredible curriculum offer we have but to make learning fun – providing engaging learning experiences that captivate pupils at the time, and are remembered for years to come.

Within each unit of work, lessons are carefully sequenced to build on prior learning and deepen understanding and retention of core concepts. This ensures sequential coverage of all the core concepts, essential skills and maximises cross-curricular links with other foundation subjects – as well as the maths, reading and writing targets for that year group.

Each lesson is framed within the context of the unit of study at the start and begins with a recap of previous learning and a discussion about the key concept and vocabulary associated with the topic, which is all displayed on our topic boards. Both subject specific and cross-curricular skills are made clear to the pupils and feature on the success criteria sheet. These are always clearly differentiated because we believe all our pupils should be able to access the entire breadth of our curriculum and discover their interests for themselves.

See our curriculum map for how this is planned across the year.