Curriculum Intent KS1 & KS2
At St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School we have developed a diverse and inclusive curriculum that aims to prepare learners to succeed in the 21st century. Our curriculum adheres to a strong set of Christian values that include challenge and the promotion of academic excellence.
Equally important, is our commitment to ensuring that our curriculum is fun, engaging and enjoyable.
Using key aspects of the National Curriculum, The Way, The Truth and The Life Curriculum and the Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) Curriculum, we have established a rich, relevant and purposeful educational experience that allows each child the unique opportunity to grow and excel emotionally, socially, mentally and physically.
Our curriculum provides learning opportunities that have local, national and international scope.
The curriculum at St Anthony’s is carefully structured and sequenced to enable children to build on their learning, progressively acquiring the knowledge and skills that they need for each stage of development.
This means ensuring children are confident in reading, writing, maths and computing, which enables them to access the broader curriculum and enrichment opportunities available.
Children are given opportunities to rehearse and embed these skills every day. They are challenged not only to develop their understanding, but to master and articulate it. As a result, our children are successful, highly motivated and independent learners who love learning.
At St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School, our intention is to develop skills that help children to become life-long learners and succeed in their future. These are embedded in our curriculum and celebrated in all classes, in our Parish and in our wider community.
Each half term, children are immersed in engaging topics. Some subjects are taught discreetly; for example Spanish, Computing and PE. However, throughout our curriculum we also provide:
Emotional Well- being & Mental Health
'Belonging' is that sense of being somewhere where you can be confident that you will fit in, and feel safe in your identity. As schools are one of the few shared social institutions which can create a sense of belonging or exclusion, it's vital that they are places of welcome and belonging. Kathryn Riley, Professor of Urban Education, UCL Institute of Education (IOE)St Anthony’s is a ‘belonging’ school where everyone is welcomed; this ethos of ‘belonging’ has a positive impact on the emotional health and well-being of our pupils, parent/carers and staff. Finally, our success as a learning institution can clearly be seen in the excellent academic results that our children achieve and their readiness as they transition to secondary school.
Overcoming Barriers to Learning
Many of the children at St Anthony’s speak English as an additional language and some of them speak 2 or 3 languages fluently. Some children are from a low socio-economic background and the school has recognised that vocabulary understanding and development needs to be a high priority.
St Anthony’s has developed a bespoke approach to the teaching of reading in KS2 (RAP) where there is a high emphasis on vocabulary development and understanding. This has its roots in the National Curriculum Content Domains for Reading.
We use a range of strategies to support vocabulary development and this is prominent in all subject areas.
Phonics and Approach to Reading
At St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School, the DfE Letters and Sounds Document is used to teach phonics from Reception though to Year Two.
We also use supplementary resources to ensure that phonics is taught in a multi-sensory way, such as those from Jolly Phonics. Cursive script is taught from Reception and the children develop early letter formation and writing skills alongside their acquisition of phonics.
Across Reception and Key Stage One a variety of Reading Schemes are utilised
to support children in making progress. These come from a range of publishers including Oxford University Press, Collins and Pearson.
Throughout the school we use Book Banding to ensure that children engage with books which are appropriate to their reading stage, offering challenge and support as needed. Book banded texts can include those from the educational publishers mentioned, as well as high quality picture books and chapter books.
In Key Stage Two, pupils undertake a daily in-depth study of a high-quality text during the Reading Acceleration Program (RAP) session. Each year group explores a new text every half term. As a school we believe that children need to have the opportunity to engage with a range of high-quality texts throughout their time with us, and beyond.
Our varied approach to reading schemes and high-quality texts reflects this.
What do Book Bands levels mean?
Reading books are graded in terms of challenge, by reading levels known as Book Bands. Each Book Band has its own colour.
The information in the guide to levelled books gives an indication of the range of Book Band levels at which most children will be reading as they progress through primary school.
The information shows the progress of an ‘average’ band of children- but no individual child is ‘average’, so no child makes smooth progress precisely in this way.
Children tend to learn in fits and starts – periods of growth followed by periods of consolidation when their progress seems to halt for a while. The periods where you don’t see rapid progress may be worrying, especially after a ‘growth spurt’, but they are important as your child develops confidence in using and applying their newly acquired skills.
They also need to read a range of texts at each level i.e. non-fiction, poems, plays etc to get a breadth across genres. It is not a race to the end of the levels – more an exploratory journey.
Cursive Handwriting at St. Anthony's
A fully joined cursive handwriting script is taught from the Early Years Foundation Stage; this means that the pen or pencil is not lifted at all from the beginning of a word to the end. The reasons for adopting this style are as follows:
It follows natural movement: