Curriculum Overview

 Newlands Primary School, it is our intention that all children leave our school with a well rounded education to prepare them for life, underpinned with a strong sense of morality and aspirational goals, to create new futures.

Our school values are explained to children everyday and are a part of our school culture and climate for learning. In order to achieve this, teachers follow a well mapped and sequenced curriculum. They plan a term’s work in all subjects to make connections between them, to take risks and to be innovative.

By delivering excellent lessons with high quality content, each child is able to build on prior knowledge and make links to the world around them.

At Newlands we aim for our curriculum to be ambitious, relative to the children’s lives and to develop a love of learning in the children we teach. Our teachers work hard to plan interesting and engaging work which stimulates children’s imagination. We maximise first hand and practical experiences using as many resources (objects, artefacts, people, places) as we can.

Depth is more important than breadth and within our long term plans we block in subjects such as Design Technology and Art to allow for maximum engagement and quality rather than surface level curriculum coverage. We have a ‘hook’ each term which teachers use at the start of each new unit to engage the children. Hooks can range from guest speakers, trips to other locations, artefacts and various experiences. 

At the start of lessons, children are required to revisit prior learning to check their understanding and ensure they are remembering key facts. Throughout lessons our teachers focus on embedding previous learning and building new learning and use many teaching strategies to assist with the learning process. At the end of every lesson, children are required to answer a few questions to check their progression. Running through our curriculum we heavily focus on reading for pleasure and we teach the skill of reading everyday.

We aim for all children to leave our school being fluent readers with a passion for reading, using the skills we teach them. We recognise that reading is an essential life skill and we are committed to enabling our children to become enthusiastic readers. At the heart of our strategy is our drive to foster a love of reading, enriching children’s learning through carefully designed teaching activities that utilise imaginative stories, thought provoking and award winning texts.

Reading is a skill that is fundamental in enabling children to develop their learning across every part of the curriculum and lays the foundations for success in the future. We recognise the importance of taking a consistent whole school approach to the teaching of reading in order to close any gaps and to enable our children to be lifelong readers. 

Should you require more information about our curriculum please do not hesitate to contact our main school office.