Key Stage 1 and 2

At Meanwood Primary School teachers follow the National Curriculum for Maths. All classes follow the White Rose Maths programme which is designed to support a mastery approach to learning. The WRM scheme of learning has number at its heart. A large proportion of time is spent reinforcing numbers to build competency through taking small steps which break down the National Curriculum objectives into manageable chunks. It ensures teachers stay in the required key stage and supports the ideal of depth before breadth. It also ensures pupils have the opportunity to stay together as they work through the schemes as a whole group, encouraging pupils of all abilities to support each other, and provides plenty of opportunities to build reasoning and problem-solving elements into the curriculum.

All children have a daily maths lesson from Reception through to Year 6. Lessons are made up of fluency, reasoning and problem-solving activities. Children are taught to focus on the key learning for their year group through carefully planned and sequenced skills and knowledge development. Opportunities to revisit previously learned skills are built into later blocks.

Maths lessons follow the Concrete, Pictorial, Abstract (CPA) sequence of learning. This approach builds on children's existing knowledge by introducing abstract concepts in a concrete and tangible way. It is a three-stage learning process where pupils learn through the physical manipulation of concrete objects, followed by learning through pictorial representations of the concrete manipulations and ending with solving problems using abstract notation.

Children in Reception and KS1 follow the Mastering Number programme, a daily teacher-led 15-minute session extra to the maths lesson. This programme is designed to secure firm foundations in the development of good number sense for all children from Reception through to Year 1 and Year 2. The aim over time is that children will leave KS1 with fluency in calculation and confidence and flexibility with numbers.

Children in Year 4, Year 5 and Year 6 also follow the Mastering Number programme. This National maths project is designed to enable KS2 pupils to develop fluency in multiplication and division facts, and confidence and flexibility with numbers that exemplify good number sense.

At Meanwood Primary School, we have adopted the RWI programme as our basis for the teaching and learning of reading in EYFS and Key Stage 1.

What is RWI?

RWI teaches children to form each letter, spell correctly, and compose their ideas step by step.
They practise handwriting every day: sitting at a table comfortably, they learn correct letter formation and how to join letters speedily and legibly.
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 Y3-6, and from the summer term in Y2, reading is taught in 3-5 weekly sessions of between 30 and 45 minutes each. Over the week there is a vocabulary lesson, oral comprehension lesson and written comprehension lesson. Each lesson starts with a 10-minute fluency focus to ensure children read as accurately and fluently as possible. Texts chosen are progressive across school in line with the Accelerated Reader programme which is used when children complete the phonics programme in Y2. Books selected for lessons include a classic text, a modern text, one from a series of books and one from an author to be studied.

In Key Stage 1 and 2, we have adapted "The Write Stuff" model 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 into 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 closely models a sentence that outlines clear writing features and techniques.
Enable section – the children write their sentences, following the structure of 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.

Our curriculum vision is based on our belief that a knowledge-rich curriculum is the best way to raise student attainment and aspiration from Nursery through to Year 6.

Underpinning our curriculum is our commitment to ensuring that every child acquires the basic skills necessary to become a successful learner.
We ensure all pupils have access to all areas of their curriculum entitlement through our broad, balanced and engaging offer.
We effectively promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.
Our pupils are taught through discrete subjects to develop subject-disciplinary knowledge.
Retrieval practice ensures that children know more and remember more over time

At Meanwood our curriculum has been designed to be bespoke to the needs of our pupils, focussing on appropriate subject-specific knowledge, skills and understanding as set out in the National Curriculum. Through our curriculum design, we consider everything that we do in school, including what we teach in timetabled lessons, and the wider experiences we provide our children throughout the school day and beyond through clubs, trips and visits. With this in mind, our entire curriculum provision is ever-evolving as we react to the changing needs of our children and the changing nature of the world we live in. Each subject area’s curriculum is designed with clear progression so that our children know more and remember more.

Our school curriculum for religious education meets the requirements of the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA). The ERA stipulates that religious education is compulsory for all children, including those in the reception class who are less than five years old. The ERA allows parents to withdraw their child from religious education classes if they so wish, although this should only be done once the parents have given written notice to the school governors. A list is kept by the Headteacher and updated annually.

For further information about the National Curriculum please click here - National Curriculum. If you would like further details about our curriculum, please ring the school office and ask to speak to Mrs Beeley our Curriculum Leader.