Intent for Science

The National Curriculum for Science aims to ensure that all children:

• Develop scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding.
• Develop an understanding of the nature, processes and methods of science through different types of science enquiries that help them to answer scientific questions about the world around them.
• Are equipped with the scientific skills required to understand the uses and implications of science, today and for the future.

At Newtown Primary School, our intent is to encourage our children to be inquisitive throughout their time at school and beyond.  Our Science curriculum promotes awe and wonder, and encourages our children to be curious about their surroundings.  As a school, we want to nurture individuals to have passion and readiness to learn in order to apply their scientific skills and become deeper thinkers.  The curriculum we have is fun, engaging and practical.  We aim high to continually build on the children’s scientific knowledge and understanding, ensuring that they have the opportunity to recall and retain what they have learnt and apply this where and when possible.  Our objective is to create opportunities for children to investigate using real life, practical activities as a stimulus to learn, thus providing them with the excitement and confidence to explore and evaluate the world that surrounds them.

Our intentions

• To ensure that every child is confident and curious about Science.
• To ensure that our children build on their prior knowledge and understanding of the subject.
• To develop a Science curriculum that provides real life, practical activities, promotes a love for learning and is accessible for all of our children.

Our Curriculum Implementation

Science at our school helps build the foundation of our children becoming critical thinkers.  Here at Newtown, we provide learning opportunities that require the children to plan, test and evaluate.  By providing regular opportunities to do this in every topic taught, our children gain a greater understanding about how to use their knowledge, skills and positive attitude to continually improve.  We actively encourage children to raise their own scientific questions, and suggest ways to find the answers.  We believe that this strengthens their knowledge and understanding, and again, creates curious minds.

• Scientific enquiry is paramount and embedded in each of the lessons taught in Science. The scientific skills that children have learnt are developed throughout their school career along with new vocabulary.  As teachers, we use questioning in class to test conceptual knowledge and skills.  This allows us to assess children regularly to identify those children with gaps in learning, and ensure that the lessons taught are accessible to all.  Most importantly, children are encouraged to generate scientific questions of their own, allowing them to take control of their learning and become independent thinkers.
• Our children at Newtown love Science at our school.  We actively embrace this by providing them with practical, real life activities.  As a school, we love to bring learning to life for the children.  They learn from these memorable experiences that we provide, and lessons often involve the teaching staff providing the resources needed to aid understanding, as well as the children deciding what equipment they may require to problem solve, experiment and evaluate.  In addition, we aim to utilise our outdoor areas as much as possible to develop children’s understanding of their surroundings by accessing outdoor learning.

Raising the profile of Science

We strive to continually raise the profile of Science in our school.  This is achieved through events such as Science Week, Science Club, competitions and the implementation of a new curriculum which is based on the children being ‘hands on’, all of which are communicated through the school newsletter.  We are very proud that our parents and carers actively get involved with tasks sent home which involve Science.  Scientific achievements are regularly celebrated within school through parental events, assemblies and our school website.

Impact

We feel at Newtown Primary School, our curriculum results in a fun, engaging, quality Science education.  This curriculum provides our children with skills and knowledge for understanding the world.  We offer varied opportunities for scientific enquiry and first-hand experiences of the world around them through learning in and out of the classroom.  Through showing our children that their work is worthy of celebrating in various ways, we have developed a scientific environment that we are proud of. It has mutual respect, confident children, a love for learning, and it is fun, all of which contribute to us evolving our future scientists.

Curriculum Maps

Progression