Dean Valley Curriculum
The National Curriculum defines the programmes of study for key subjects in maintained state primary and secondary schools in England. Fundamentally, it sets out what your child is supposed to learn and when.
Each school in England has taken the new Curriculum and designed their own school Curriculum from the statutory one. Staff at Dean Valley have worked together to build a stimulating and cohesive curriculum for children ensuring that all Curriculum content is covered. With Diversity at the heart whilst encompassing our Rights Respecting school ethos.
Click here to read our Curriculum Statement.
The Dean Valley curriculum has been planned to offer our learners every opportunity to immerse themselves within subjects building their knowledge and understanding within every area. Our curriculum is based around concepts which are the ‘big ideas’ that help to shape our children’s thinking within each subject area. Throughout each year group we explore the same key concepts in every year group so that children gradually increase their understanding of them. An example of a concept in history would be ‘evidence tells us about the past’. This concept will be taught in a range and breadth of context so that it can be explored carefully to give meaning and help children to make links in their learning.
Knowledge is key to children making sense of these concepts, it is built over time. An example would be when children in Year 1 and 2 learn about the Great Fire of London to explore the concept of ‘evidence tells us about the past’. Children will look at extracts of Samuel Pepys diary and will explore how an historical account gives us knowledge about the cause and spread of the fire. The more opportunity children have to gain knowledge by investigating and exploring the world around them the better, knowledge of the world around them helps them with reading and making inferences.
Once knowledge is gained form learning and children are given ample opportunity to explore and investigate concepts in context they begin to transfer concepts to other situations. We have planned to provide a breadth of contexts so that children can apply previous knowledge and understanding of the world through long term memory recalling previous learning. So, going back to the concept of ‘evidence tells us about the past’ and learning about the Great Fire of London children have learnt that a vital piece of evidence is that Samuel Pepys kept a diary. They can then link this concept in Year 3 and 4 to the Ancient Egyptians, where they may learn about Rosetta Stone that gave evidence of the meaning of hieroglyphics or in Year 5 and 6 where evidence of the famous Greek epics, ‘The lliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’, are valuable source of evidence about Geek life, culture and religious beliefs.
Building essential knowledge ‘cultural capital’ allows children to develop into rounded and educated citizens, prepares them for future success and gives our children the best possible start to their early education.
Click on the files below to see our curriculum plans for each subject area, these are broken into Milestones which show the progression through EYFS, Year 1 and 2 (Milestone 1), Year 3 and 4 (Milestone 2) and Year 5 and 6 (Milestone 3). Each Milestone contains descriptors which give more detail to be discovered within concepts. Over our two year rolling program children will become more and more familiar with concepts and explore them in a breadth of contexts.
You can also view the end of year expectations for each subject and each year group below.
