Curriculum
Having Fun, Learning Together
At Archibald, our team of enthusiastic, experienced, and dedicated staff work collaboratively to ensure that we provide the best possible education we can offer. Together, we strive to make learning fun for everyone, deliver an enriched curriculum and support each child’s journey – socially, physically, emotionally and academically.
After consulting all stakeholders associated with the school, we developed our school vision. It explains how all of our learners will develop at Archibald, and leave us as curious, caring, creative, and courageous children, ready to explore their world further in the next phase of their lives at middle school.
The following drivers form our school vision and are embedded within our broad and balanced curriculum.
Curious Learners
We want our children to have curious minds. To develop curious learners, we encourage our children to ask questions, generate ideas and to look at things from different angles. We encourage our children to make connections with their learning and connect their ideas in imaginative ways. We seek to develop each child’s thirst for knowledge and understanding; to support a desire to be well-informed about the world around them. Our curriculum is designed to be progressive in nature, building on previous learning and supporting the children to make links across lessons. As part of this, our curriculum encompasses key skills such as reading, listening, researching, and the importance of having the courage to question, clarify, reason and debate.
Our curriculum is designed to ensure that children are not merely covering content whilst acquiring new facts and knowledge, but achieving a depth to their learning which enables them to use their skills and understanding in a cross-curricular way. Our curriculum is enquiry-based so as to make learning as interesting and meaningful as possible for the children. Being curious is not limited to academic knowledge, and so, encompasses the awareness of the people and the world around our learners, both near and far. It is in this way, that we will also develop caring learners.
Caring Learners
We are a welcoming and inclusive school, and we want our children to care about themselves, others, and the world around them, by being respectful, tolerant, aware, empathetic and appreciative.
We aspire for all of our children to feel healthy in both mind and body; to be independent in thought and to have good self-esteem. To show care towards themselves, we help the children to learn about, understand and talk about, their emotions. Our children are then encouraged to take ownership of their approach to life at school and beyond, with the support of our School Rules. To show care towards others, we encourage our learners to work together to share ideas, listen to others and watch carefully, and to consider other possibilities. Through our pastoral and academic curricula, we encourage the children to celebrate differences, use manners, consider other people’s feelings and listen to each other’s opinions.
We aim to provide a safe, happy and caring environment where we can foster strong partnerships within our local community. We have a duty to help our children develop an awareness of their responsibility towards both the school environment and the natural world. We provide opportunities for our learners to experience our world’s diversity and show how they can care about its management and sustainability.
Creative Learners
At Archibald, learning is designed to be meaningful and exciting for all involved. We understand that creativity is vital in supporting pupils to imagine, enquire and become increasingly innovative. This is facilitated through our broad and balanced curriculum where children are provided with a wide range of opportunities to explore and develop creative thinking skills. They are encouraged to think and discuss critically, solve problems and make well-informed choices. We provide opportunities for children to seek out new experiences, investigate and experiment with new ideas, and encourage them to ask questions to further develop their imagination, critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Courageous Learners
We understand that, as human beings, we can sometimes feel nervous or unsure, however, we can have the courage to try new things each and every day. We want all of our children to develop a desire to try new things, and ultimately, feel ready when they move to middle school. To get to this point, we help our children become determined, adaptable and resilient learners, by nurturing their natural curiosity and enabling them to develop self-motivation and a life-long love of learning.
We aspire to help children to become confident in their own abilities, and to find their voice whilst at Archibald, as we believe that the development of speaking and listening skills are fundamental. We encourage talk in all areas of learning and encourage our children to articulate their own point of view, whilst also being respectful towards the suggestions of others. We also aim to give our children the confidence to challenge issues that they perceive as unjust.
Find out about our curriculum characters below…
Our school vision and curriculum intent are further echoed in our collective School Rules:
- We are ready
- We are responsible
- We are respectful
- We are safe
