Curriculum

As in other state schools, all the children of statutory school age at St Michael’s Church of England Junior School follow the National Curriculum. 

This means they follow nationally agreed programmes of study in Maths, English, Science, Computing, Art, Music, PE, History, Geography and DT.  In addition to the subjects specified in the National Curriculum, the school curriculum also includes religious education and cross-curricular issues such as personal and social education, health education, environmental education, equal opportunities and multi-cultural education.  In our school prospectus more information can be found.

How We Organise Learning

During the school year, each class’s work is planned around a series of topics or units of work, lasting half a term or a term.  The topics are organised so that all areas of the National Curriculum are included over the year.

For details of our curriculum please view our CURRICULUM CONTENT page.

The Creative curriculum

 Each term we focus on a different topic and embed our learning by integrating Science, Geography, History, Art, Design Technology and Computing within the topic. We feel that this gives our children the freedom to learn in a creative and exciting way. This also allows our teachers to be flexible within their teaching methods and gives the children ownership of their own learning.

Our school motto is ‘Be The Best You Can Be’.

To achieve this with all of our children we believe that there are certain rules we need to adhere to 

• Children feel cared about and are happy, secure, motivated and stimulated
• The learning environment promotes learning and is well organised, attractive, stimulating and positive.
• Children should always be told what it is they are going to learn so they are set a Key Question to answer, along with an LJ (learning journey) which tells children the specific nature of their learning in a lesson.
• Children are told what they need to do to be successful learners
• Children are helped to be able to assess their own learning and the learning of others
• Learning tasks are well differentiated and organised into small steps
• Children experience a variety of learning situations both in and outdoors
• Lessons are interesting, stimulating and fun.
• Children often have the opportunity to learn through first-hand experience.
• Expectations of the children’s behaviour and abilities maintain high
• Children receive positive feedback and focused marking enabling them to identify what they need to do next
• Children are given time to reflect on their learning
• The learning environment promotes learning and is well-organised, attractive, stimulating and positive.
• Children are given time to explore learning via extended and home based tasks.

Classroom displays focus on aspects of the topic and we try hard to make classroom work interesting and meaningful to children.  We hope they will experience memorable learning activities each week and because we understand that children learn in a variety of ways we aim to ensure a wide range of activities are provided.  In addition, we also promote choice, which allows children to take ownership of their learning, therefore we offer a selection of differentiated tasks; these consist of bronze, silver, gold and platinum choices.

Children are encouraged to work both independently and collaboratively in a group, according to the work they are involved.

Children progress through the objectives of the National Curriculum at their own pace.  Their progress is carefully checked by teachers through the ‘Learning Journey Assessment programme’.  Teachers also assess on a daily basis through work scrutiny, marking for improvement and verbal feedback to individual children and groups.

Response to marking (RTM) is also covered at the beginning of the next learning session. 

Please see our topic webs on the class pages and newsletters for more curriculum information.

Accelerated Reader

From December 2015 pupils at St Michael’s juniors will be participating in the Accelerated Reader (AR) Programme.  For further details please speak to your child’s class teacher or you may download the parents information document.

http://doc.renlearn.com/KMNet/R003985016GG79F2.pdf

Extra-curricular activities

From time-to-time, teachers will arrange for pupils to experience exciting activities and learning experiences outside of the classroom. These can take place both at school or off-site. Some of these will be free of charge, whilst others will cost an affordable amount of money. These experiences broaden the children's knowledge and understanding of the world around them and inspire further learning. Each year group will go on at least one major trip per year.

Permission for all off-site activities will be sought at the very start of the year. For trips that require a donation, a letter will be sent out in advance.