At Oldway, we aim for a high quality, engaging and progressive curriculum that develops their natural curiosity in the world around them. We aim to enthuse our children through science to prepare them for an ever changing and rapidly growing industry. Our pupils will develop their knowledge, skills, concepts and positive attitudes through a contextual and challenging curriculum, utilising our local and wider environment. As scientists our children will focus on the key features of scientific enquiry including: observing over time, pattern seeking, identifying classifying and grouping, comparative and fair testing, and research using secondary sources. Children will seek to ask questions, use scientific vocabulary, articulate scientific concepts, create hypotheses, experiment and record and analyse data, in a purposeful and exciting context whilst working collaboratively. This will ensure that our children will achieve, make good progress, reflect on their learning and build on their science capital.
At Oldway, science is taught through science-led themes with cross-curricular links and local connections made, where appropriate. To ensure scientific skills are coherently developed, each lesson has a working-scientifically focus, which the children are made explicitly aware of through the use of ‘science icons’. Each lesson begins with a short ‘science warm-up’ to help them recap and activate prior knowledge as well as developing reasoning and oracy skills. Children will also build up their knowledge through each topic by adding to knowledge organisers, which will be revisited in subsequent years to support progression of substantive knowledge and recall of prior learning.