Curriculum Statement: Our curriculum is very closely linked to our vision “Be Courageous. Be Strong. Do Everything with love.” and this is at the centre of our curriculum design. As a school with a fluctuating cohort and large differences in numbers within each year group, our curriculum overview links to our class structure with subject specific focus and emphasis on skills progression. This approach ensures high expectations and outcomes that challenge and develop every child’s personal skillset. It is vital to us that our children have an inclusive curriculum that celebrates diversity and ‘brings the world to Warton’
Intent: At Warton, we want every child to leave our school in Year 6 with a love of reading, a range of favourite authors and poets and to have the confidence to write for a range of purposes. For this reason, our reading and writing curricula are deeply entwined; with us following a whole school reading into writing process.
The quality of education in writing has been successfully developed to ensure a well thought out approach. At Warton this is based on a model of narrative, non- narrative and poetry based writing opportunities. These are carefully sequenced from Early Years to Year 6 to ensure that pupils have the opportunity to apply knowledge and skills and retrieve prior learning on a cyclical basis. Our curriculum offer for English is based upon core texts for each year group. Through these core texts, children will read traditional tales, modern fiction, classic fiction and access visual literacy through both picture books and film. In Year 6, instead of reading a traditional tale, the children study and read Shakespeare.
At Warton, the lesson structure includes a ‘let’s recap’ to ensure a specific retrieval activity is planned in each lesson which allows pupils to ‘know more, remember more, do more’ as well as developing subject specific vocabulary. Each writing opportunity is planned to ensure that pupils are highly engaged through a clear understanding of the purpose, outcome and audience for their writing.
Through a high quality Writing curriculum, pupils become fluent and confident in the fundamentals of English, including Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation as outlined in our skills progression map. This also ensures that where we have mixed age classes, pupils remain challenged appropriately for their year group. Our Writing curriculum will allow our pupils to recall and apply knowledge accurately to a range of different genres across the curriculum and in different context which will enable them to ‘know more, remember more, do more’.
Our Writing curriculum is based on genres that improve ‘Cultural Capital’, in particular, due to the context of our school expanding pupils’ awareness to diversity and difference. We consider cross curricular writing to be crucial in the development and remembering of key skills. Therefore, planned cross curricular writing opportunities are throughout our wider curriculum.