OUR CURRICULUM

At Childer Thornton, we firmly believe in providing a curriculum that will both provide our pupils with meaningful experiences and prepare them for life in modern day Britain. In 2018, we embarked on an exciting adventure in the form of ‘The Zoo Project’ in collaboration with Ignite Teaching Alliance and Chester Zoo, and the spark from this ignited our own new curriculum entitled ‘Our Wonderful World’. This has been developed over time to ensure the content closely matches the needs of the children in our school. It is our aim to ensure that our learners are aware of social justice, conservation issues and that they have a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips - in turn we hope they will leave our school being confident, articulate, resilient and passionate, but also, that they will want to make a difference to our world and change it for the better.

A Values-Based Approach

‘Our Wonderful World’ curriculum is based upon a set of values that we have thought very carefully about in our school. These underpin the children’s learning and are promoted wherever possible. When thinking about ‘Our Wonderful World’, we encourage the children to consider the different aspects of the world in which they live e.g. in Y1 the children think about Childer Thornton and look at the history of the local area, as well as how they can help to keep it clear of litter to protect local wildlife, but in Y6, the children think about ‘World at War’ and examine World War Two and the relevance to refugees and the homeless of today.

Our Values

We used Schwarz’s values map as a starting point for selecting what we felt were the values that underpin ‘Our Wonderful World’:

Broadmindedness - children are encouraged to be broadminded and our topics aim to nurture this and challenge thinking.

Curiosity - children are encouraged to be curious and ask questions about the world.

Creativity - children are encouraged to think creatively and look to the work of others to gain inspiration.

Responsibility - children are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning but also the world in which they live.

Sense of Belonging - children are encouraged to consider what it means to belong and what this might look like for different people in our world.

Enjoying Life - the children’s happiness is at the core of everything we do!

Kindness - although not on the map, the pupils voted to add kindness to our school values in 2022, as they felt it an important aspect of our school.

What is looks like…

Each unit of study starts with a ‘hook’ activity to challenge the children’s thinking and encourage empathy. This is followed by the children developing both narrative and philosophical questions that they reflect upon throughout the unit of study. The children are presented with a knowledge organiser containing information at the start of a unit and carefully structured activities are planned to ensure this knowledge is committed to long term memory.

English is the ‘golden thread’ that runs through our topics as more often than not, the children’s reading and written work is based upon a text closely linked to the topic content. We also pay close attention to how we teach new vocabulary, and oracy is another aspect we are developing this year, as we want to ensure the children are confident and articulate.

Although we develop schema links across subject areas, subjects are taught as discrete disciplines to ensure children are gaining the specific knowledge and skills to meet our ambitious year group end points.

For more information, see our separate curriculum pages or the overview below.