Maths
Teachers follow the national curriculum for maths. We emphasise the importance of developing good mental maths skills alongside ensuring our maths curriculum is broad and enables children to apply skills through problem solving activities. Children from Reception onwards have a daily maths lesson.
English
At Meanwood Primary School, we have adopted the RWI programme as our basis for the teaching and learning of reading and writing in Key Stage 1.
What is RWI?
- RWI teaches children to form each letter, spell correctly, and compose their ideas step by step.
- The children write every day, rehearsing out loud what they want to say, before spelling the words using the graphemes and ‘tricky’ words they know.
- They practise handwriting every day: sitting at a table comfortably, they learn correct letter formation and how to join letters speedily and legibly.
- Children’s composition (ideas, vocabulary and grammar) is developed by drawing on their own experiences and talking about the stories they read.
- In RWI phonics lessons, children learn to read accurately and fluently with good comprehension.
- They rapidly learn sounds and the letter, or groups of letters, they need to represent them. This knowledge is taught and consolidated every day.
- Children read the story three times. On the first read, children focus on accurate word reading. On the second read they develop fluency and on the third read they focus on comprehension. Fluency and comprehension increase with each repeated reading.
In Key Stage 2 we have adopted "The Write Stuff" by Jane Considine to bring clarity to the mechanics of writing. "The Write Stuff" follows a method called "Sentence Stacking" which refers to the fact that sentences are stacked together chronologically and organised to engage children with short, intensive moments of learning that they can then immediately apply to their own writing. An individual lesson is based on a sentence model, broken in to 3 learning chunks. Each learning chunk has three sections:
- Initiate section – a stimulus to capture the children’s imagination and set up a sentence.
- Model section – the teacher close models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
- Enable section – the children write their sentence, following the model.
Children are challenged to ‘Deepen the Moment’ which requires them to independently draw upon previously learnt skills and apply them to their writing during that chunk.
National Curriculum coverage
Each Year Group Overview document shows the overall coverage of each National Curriculum subject in each year group from Year 1 to year 6. Teachers then plan discrete, progressive sequences of lessons for each subject but with a focus on making cross-curricular links between subjects. These links provide an immersive learning experience which maximises the opportunity for learners to explore their knowledge and skills through their time at Meanwood.
For further information about the National Curriculum please click here: National Curriculum
