Our Curriculum Intent

At The Meadows Primary Academy, we believe that all children develop a lifelong love of learning and have a thirst for knowledge. We provide them with a knowledge-based curriculum which sparks curiosity, broadens their experiences and gives them the knowledge they need to reach the highest of aspirations. Our inspiring curriculum has been carefully designed and sequenced to allowed children to fluent with powerful knowledge and vocabulary. Our curriculum also enables our children to develop life-skills and core values that will enable them to excel in their future.

To help ensure our children have a meaningful context to their learning and to ensure learning flows from one area to another through conceptual awareness and understanding we have core concepts that run throughout our curriculum. These are:

•        Chronology

•        Diversity

•        Democracy

•        Significance 

Our curriculum intent is captured through the following 5 themes:

R-A-I-S-E

Retention – Application – Inspiration – School Values – Excellent Explanation 

Retention of Powerful Knowledge and Vocabulary  

 Our curriculum allows children to retain powerful knowledge and vocabulary. It is not merely a set of facts for children to learn and forget. It has been carefully designed to ensure that knowledge is stored in our children’s long term memories, so that they can build on it and use it in later life.

Application of Powerful Knowledge and Vocabulary  

We have designed a curriculum that allows children to become confident and fluent with powerful knowledge and vocabulary. Children are taught in such a way that they acquire knowledge that they can take with them for the rest of their lives, knowledge that they can use when forming arguments and judgements, or when reading and solving problems. Challenging opportunities to apply knowledge are embedded throughout our curriculum. Progressively planned learning enables children to constantly apply prior knowledge and build upon it.

Inspiration

We ensure that all children are exposed to a wide range of experiences that will develop their cultural capital and give them an advantage in later life. We have developed a curriculum that prepares children for the next stage in their education and life. By the time children leave us in Year 6, they will have wide range of experiences beyond learning knowledge in the classroom. 

We ensure that all children gain a wealth of experiences beyond learning facts in the classroom. We want our curriculum to inspire children to want to learn more, to provoke children’s intellectual curiosity and to create experiences of awe and wonder. We aim for all children to take part in memorable experiences that will expand their cultural capital.

We want all of our children to be global citizens with a strong sense of global awareness. Our curriculum will provide children with knowledge and experiences that enable them to know their responsibility and role in our world, both now and in the future. 

School Values

Our 6 values underpin all that we do at The Meadows. We want all children to be kind, resilient, aspirational, respectful, curious and a team player in all they do. Children develop these values throughout their time at The Meadows and learning is carefully and purposefully linked to all 6 values.

Excellent Explanation

We have carefully interwoven key concepts across our curricululm so that our children connect their knowledge and see a ‘bigger picture’. Our children are provided with planned opportunities to recall their knowledge, meaning they can confidently talk about their previous learning.

Academic talk is a key part of our curriculum, where children are given opportunities to apply their knowledge and ambitious vocabulary through a range of oracy and written tasks. By the time pupils leave us in Year 6, they will be able to communicate with confidence in the world beyond our school gate.