Curriculum Information
Our Curriculum
Our staff worked together to encapsulate the vision for our school curriculum and the pedagogy that underpins it. This is summarised in the link below:
Our Mengham Curriculum and Pedagogy
Subject Overviews
Our subject Leaders have thought carefully about the National/Early Year curriculum Frameworks, our school context and our school values to devise subject skills progressions for their subjects. We are currently reviewing these documents in anticipation of the changes to the EYFS framework from September 2021.
These skills and knowledge progression documents are used by our teachers when planning their subject learning journeys each half term in order to ensure that the children’s skills and knowledge build and develop as they move through school.
The progressions ensure all our teachers understand what has come before and what will come next.
These progressions have also been shared with both island junior schools so that they can continue to use the children’s prior learning to inform their plans and practice.
Phonics and Reading
Phonics is delivered across school using Twinkl Phonics.
Our reading scheme has been set up in line with the phased approach within Twinkl phonics. Children work their way through the reading books which link directly to the phonics they have already learnt in school. As well as physical reading books, that come home in the children’s book bags to be shared at home, the children are also sent home weekly e books which link directly to the sounds being taught that week so that they can further practice applying their phonics within the context of a text.
Our Curriculum Promise
Our staff recognise that there is a need to enhance our curriculum in order to develop the cultural capital of our pupils and address the disparity that can be caused through disadvantage. Part of our work on addressing this gap is done through our Curriculum Promise. At the start of each year our Curriculum Promise Leader carries out some work to investigate the types of extracurricular activities the children in our school have experienced and the wealth of experiences that our school community can offer us to learn from. We aim to celebrate and build on these diverse experiences whilst exposing the children to new areas of cultural capital that they might not necessarily otherwise experience. There is a small budget available to plan learning experiences to tie in with each year group’s topic and skills based learning. This could be through trips, visitors or access to specific resources/texts. In addition to this teachers think carefully about the experiences and knowledge children need in order to access their learning appropriately, i.e., how can we expect children to access a topic about boats if they have never actually seen a real boat, or create a puppet show when they have never watched one. Likewise, we work hard to value the cultural capital brought to us by the children in our care, for example, we may ask families to share their cultural capital with our wider school community through planned classroom activities. Our curriculum promise is designed to ensure that all children start their learning units with the same levels of knowledge and experience and to enhance the curriculum in order to value and build their cultural capital further.
Our Safeguarding Curriculum
Safeguarding plays a key role in our school. Alongside compliance with requirements and a culture where safeguarding is always a priority, we work hard to ensure that children are being taught a range of ways to keep themselves safe, manage their mental health effectively and learn about becoming good citizens. These topics are embedded throughout the curriculum in an age appropriate manner.