Here at St Peter’s, we understand the importance of high quality computing education that equips our pupils with the skills needed to become digitally literate.

Computational thinking is key to ensuring that all pupils are able to participate effectively and safely in the digital world. High quality computing education paves the pathway to a world of innovation and creativity, with deep links in mathematics, science, design and technology, and much more.

Each unit of our computing curriculum is separated into different units for coverage of the 2014 National Curriculum for Key Stage 1 and 2.

Our extensive coverage mean that all pupils will have access to a wide range of computing hardware and software that will equip them with the skills needed to construct computer programs, 3D drawings, presentations, develop games, animations, short films and publish documents using a printer. 

The importance of online safety is emphasised each year with lessons on safe searching, understanding social media (how to keep your information safe), using reputable sources and the benefits of disconnecting. Parent workshops are provided to help us create an environment where pupils are educated and able to make informed decisions with the support and guidance of those who care for them.

Design and Technology

Here a St Peter’s we understand the importance of active learning and aspire to provide an environment enriched with practical learning opportunities. As Benjamin Franklin famously said “Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” We know that pupils learn best when they are free to explore and test their ideas in a safe and stimulating environment. Subsequently, our curriculum is enriched with a wide range of opportunities that encourage creativity and innovation throughout the classroom. 

Through active enquiry, each pupil will develop a wealth of knowledge as they learn about famous artists and inventors, explore historical architecture, discover different embroidery techniques and more. Each pupil will design, make and evaluate a product each term as they explore their ideas, work with their peers and develop their understanding.   

“The study of geography is more than just memorizing places on a map. It’s about understanding the complexities of our world.” Barak Obama

Through teaching Geography at St Peter’s, we intend to inspire pupils with a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

We believe that teaching should equip pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and both natural and human environments, together with an understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes.

We want our children to gain confidence and practical experiences of geographical knowledge, understanding and skills that explain how the earth is interconnected and changes over time.  At St Peter’s we strive to highlight positive contributions that our pupils could make as informed global citizens.

At St Peter’s we implement our geography curriculum in the following ways:

• Through themed lessons which encourage the transfer of knowledge and vocabulary.
• Enquiry based research activities – children given opportunities to ask and answer questions.
• Cross-curricular learning opportunities, such as whole school geography days.
• Field work including mapping the school and trips to investigate the local area’s physical and  human features.

Jigsaw - The Mindful Approach To PSHE

https://www.jigsawpshe.com/primary-pshe-scheme-of-work-including-statutory-relationships-and-health-education/ 

The 2014 National Curriculum for Maths aims to ensure that all children:

• Become fluent in the fundamentals of Mathematics
• Are able to reason mathematically
• Can solve problems by applying their Mathematics

At St. Peter’s Primary School, all of these skills are embedded within Maths lessons and are developed consistently over time. We are committed to developing our children’s curiosity about the subject, to recognise the importance of Maths in the wider world and that they are able to use their mathematical skills and knowledge confidently in their lives in a range of different contexts. We want all children to enjoy Mathematics and to experience success in the subject, with the ability to reason mathematically and problem solve. As a result, our maths curriculum is designed to meet the needs of our children; objectives are broken down into smaller, key learning points and include a range of concrete, pictorial and abstract approaches. Links across other mathematical topics and subjects are established, allowing pupils to apply their new skills.

Scheme of Work

St. Peter’s Primary School follows a scheme of work called White Rose Maths, which is designed to enable children to develop a mastery of mathematics. In this scheme, National Curriculum objectives are grouped together into units of learning. Each unit focuses on a small number of key learning points. Teachers then develop these key learning points and plan lessons which involve fluency, reasoning and problem solving activities.

Lesson Organisation

Children at St. Peter’s undertake a main maths lesson each day and a 20 minute ‘Maths Mastery’ session in KS1 or a ‘Maths Fluency’ session in KS2 where they focus on key arithmetic skills.

Modern Foreign Languages (MFL)

St. Peter’s Primary School’s aim is that all pupils will develop a genuine interest and positive curiosity about foreign languages, predominantly Spanish.

Learning a second language will offer pupils the opportunity to explore relationships between language and identity, develop a deeper understanding of other cultures and the world around them with a better awareness of self, key individuals and cultural differences. The intention is that pupils will feel able and encouraged to continue studying languages beyond key stage 2 and ultimately be working towards becoming life-long language learners.

The four key language learning skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) will be taught in an age-appropriate way across key stage 2. This will enable pupils to use and apply their learning in a variety of contexts, laying down solid foundations for future language learning.

In key stage one, teachers are encouraged to teach ‘incidental Spanish’ through singing and simple vocabulary.

 The National Curriculum for languages aims to ensure that all pupils:

• Understand and respond to spoken and written language from a variety of authentic sources
• Speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity, finding ways of communicating what they want to say, including through discussion and asking questions, and continually improving the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation
• Can write at varying length, for different purposes and audiences, using the variety of grammatical structures that they have learnt
• Discover and develop an appreciation of a range of writing in the language studied

At St. Peter’s Primary School our aim is to develop a love and appreciation of music where pupils have the confidence, knowledge and skills to experiment with composition and performance. Music plays a big part in the life of our school and can be heard in all classes. We aim to help children to understand the value and importance of music in the wider community and to ensure that they are able to use their musical skills, knowledge and experiences to involve themselves in music in a variety of contexts.

What Music looks like in our school:

• Teachers follow the Long-Term Plan ensuring they cater for all abilities.
• All members of staff are committed to using the Charanga scheme of work in order to help children to gain a deep-rooted love of music, including reading notation in KS2.
• Lessons will be fun and engaging, developing pupils’ confidence to experiment musically.
• Fundamental skills in singing, playing instruments, listening and creating music will be taught, progressing onto composition and the history of music.
• Opportunities will be given for pupils to compose and perform.
• Children will have a love and appreciation of music that they are confident to talk about.

End of EYFS:

• Children sing songs, make music and dance, and experiment with ways of changing them.
• They represent their own ideas, thoughts and feelings through, art, music, dance, role play and stories.

End of KS1

• Be able to use their voices expressively and creatively by singing songs and speaking chants and rhymes.
• Play tuned and untuned instruments musically.
• Listen with concentration and understanding to a range of high-quality live and recorded music.
• Can experiment with, create, select and combine sounds using the inter-related dimensions of music.

End of KS2:

• Play and perform in solo and ensemble contexts, using their voices and playing musical instruments with increasing accuracy, fluency, control and expression.
• Improvise and compose music for a range of purposes using the inter-related dimensions of music.
• Listen with attention to detail and recall sounds with increasing aural memory.
• Use and understand staff and other musical notations.
• Appreciate and understand a wide range of high-quality live and recorded music drawn from different traditions and from great composers and musicians.
• Develop an understanding of the history of music. 

Statement of Intent

Our aim here at St Peters is to inspire our children to create a lifelong love for an active lifestyle and personal desire to achieve.

Our physical education curriculum ensures that our children are able to develop holistically through sporting values such as; determination, perseverance, resilience and loyalty. Creating an environment that is fully inclusive is at the forefront of our physical education lessons, where every child can achieve.

During our lessons we teach and demonstrate good sportsmanship. Developing characteristics such as respect and honesty will help our children to communicate well with others and make a positive contribution to society.

In PE pupils develop their skills through Dance, Gymnastics, Outdoor Adventure activities, Athletics, Swimming and Games. Various different team sports are taught throughout the game’s module over the year, including Netball, Hockey, Tag Rugby, Cricket and Rounders. Our children have the opportunity to compete in some of the sports on offer against other County schools.

OAA team work and leadership

Extra curricula clubs are on offer to all children throughout the week covering a wider range of activities. Our Lego and cooking clubs are a great success.

Each year group has the opportunity to experience forest school over a course of 6 weeks. Our children have hands on experiences in a natural setting on site, which develop confidence and self-esteem through exploration and supported risk taking.

PE kit: All children (with the exception of years 5&6) are expected to come in to school in their PE kit on their timetabled day. Appropriate wear for PE lessons is essential to ensure your child’s safety and is also part of St Peters Primary Schools home school agreement. Our school PE kit consists of:

• Plain white tshirt
• Bottom layers need to be black in the form of tracksuit/joggers or leggings or in the hotter weather shorts or skort. 
• Pumps or Trainers for indoor use
• Outdoor Trainers suitable for use on the school field or playground

For health and safety long hair needs to be tied back and all jewellery removed, including stud earrings, watches and fitness trackers.

At St Peters Primary school, we follow the British values which support children’s spiritual, social, moral and cultural development. Through the teaching of Religious Education, we are nurturing these by enriching children’s knowledge of world views and religions. We follow the Herefordshire agreed Religious Education syllabus.  

Through the teaching of religious education children learn: 

How to make sense of religious and non-religious beliefs so that they can: 

• Identify, describe, explain and analyse beliefs and concepts in the context of living religions.  
• Explain how and why these beliefs are understood. 
• Recognise how and why teachings are explained, taught and interpreted in different ways. 

Understand the impact and significance of religious and non-religious beliefs, so that they can: 

• Examine and explain why and how people express their beliefs in diverse ways. 

• Understand how beliefs impact on people’s everyday lives. 

• Appreciate and analyse other people’s different ways of life  

Make connections between religious and non-religious beliefs, concepts, practices and ideas studied so that they can: 

• Evaluate, reflect on and enquire about key concepts and questions studied. 

• Challenge the ideas studied and allow the ideas studied to challenge their own thinking, articulating beliefs values and commitments clearly.  

• Find possible connections between ideas studied and their own ways of understanding the world, expressing themselves through critical thinking and reflection.  

Which religions are taught? 

Reception: Christianity and other faiths as part of their growing sense of self, their own community and their place within it. 

KS1: Christianity, Judaism, Islam 

KS2: Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism 

Assemblies are held each week, as part of our collective worship provision to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral and cultural development. 

The school has close links with our local churches who visit the school to deliver assemblies and assist with curriculum delivery.   

Whilst we value the importance of teaching religious education, we also recognise that some families wish for their children to be excluded from learning, if this is the case please feel free to contact the school.  

Reading is at the heart of everything we do. 

The skill of reading is vitally important, and will have a direct influence on all areas of the curriculum.

At St. Peter’s, our aim is to encourage our pupils to have a love for reading.

We want to foster a love of reading, where children can not only demonstrate an understanding of what they have read, but also show enthusiasm and excitement for it. Children are offered a wide range of reading materials, from their own class reading areas, topic books that are displayed around the classroom, or our brand new school library. 

Children have the opportunity to hear adults read stories, poems and non-fiction books to them regularly. We encourage pupils to read with intonation, pitch and tone. To encourage performance, children are given the opportunity to read / perform poetry to the whole class or school.

Children begin with reading books matched to their phonetic ability through Read Write Phonics in Reception Y1 and Y2, before moving onto the Accelerated Reader scheme.

https://www.renlearn.co.uk/accelerated-reader/

As the children progress, they read increasingly complex books, which depart from phonics. The reading scheme comprises books from a range of text types and genres, including children’s classics. Reading books are taken home by the children so that they can be shared with family members.

We ask parents to support their child with reading, by encouraging them to regularly hear their child read and promote the love of books.

We reward children that work hard with their reading by awarding weekly ‘Reading Champion’ certificates and half termly visits to our book vending machine.

 Throughout the school we use VIPERS (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summarising/Sequencing) to ensure the National Curriculum skills are covered. VIPERS is not a reading scheme but rather a method of ensuring that teachers ask, and students are familiar with, a range of questions. These reading comprehension lessons enable our pupils look deeply into different texts, learning new language and widening their imagination.

Reading

The skills of reading, writing, and speaking and listening are vitally important and will have a direct influence on all areas of the curriculum.

Our aim is to encourage our pupils to have a love for reading and writing and have a good understanding of vocabulary in the written and spoken format.

At St. Peter’s Primary School writing is taught through The Write Stuff writing scheme. This approach makes sure that all of our children are exposed to high quality texts that stimulate quality responses to reading, high quality writing and purposeful speaking and listening opportunities. Our curriculum ensures that all children have plenty of opportunities to write for different purposes. We encourage writing through all curriculum areas and use quality reading texts to model examples of good writing. Writing is taught through a number of different strategies. We believe that children need lots of rich speaking and drama activities to give them the imagination and the experiences that will equip them to become good writers.

The Write Stuff is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking lessons are broken into bite-sized chunks and taught under the structural framework of The Writing Rainbow. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing.

We recognise the importance of developing a clear style of handwriting early on. In the reception class, children are taught to form each letter of the alphabet correctly. Presentation is important and pupils are encouraged to take a pride in their work. Writing is frequently displayed and celebrated at St. Peter’s.

What writing looks like in our school:

• Learners being encouraged to write.
• Daily writing sessions which link to class text.
• Shared writing sessions for the entire class.
• Guided writing sessions for small groups of children.
• Clear objectives being taught.
• Children engaged in activities to help them internalise texts such as role play and hot seating.
• Clear feedback to the children.
• Examples of text, children’s work and other appropriate resources on working walls.
• Children referring to the working wall and other resources.
• Motivated learners who enjoy writing.

End of EYFS

• Children use their phonic knowledge to write words in ways which match their spoken sounds.
• They also write some irregular common words.
• They write simple sentences which can be read by themselves and others.
• Some words are spelled correctly and others are phonetically plausible.

End of KS1

• Write simple, coherent narratives about personal experiences and those of others (real or fictional). Write about real events, recording these simply and clearly.
• Demarcate most sentences in their writing with capital letters and full stops, and use question marks correctly when required.
• Use present and past tense mostly correctly and consistently. Use co-ordination (e.g. or / and / but) and some subordination (e.g. when / if / that / because) to join clauses.
• Segment spoken words into phonemes and represent these by graphemes, spelling many of these words correctly and making phonically-plausible attempts at others.
• Spell many common exception words.
• Form capital letters and digits of the correct size, orientation and relationship to one another and to lower-case letters.
• Use spacing between words that reflects the size of the letters.

End of Lower KS2

• In narratives, describe settings and characters.
• Use a range of devices to build cohesion (e.g. conjunctions, adverbials of time and place, pronouns, synonyms) within and across paragraphs.
• Use the range of punctuation taught at key stage 2 mostly correctly (e.g. inverted commas and other punctuation to indicate direct speech).
• Integrate dialogue in narratives to convey character and advance the action.

End of KS2

• Write effectively for a range of purposes and audiences, selecting language that shows good awareness of the reader (e.g. the use of the first person in a diary; direct address in instructions and persuasive writing).
• In narratives, describe settings, characters and atmosphere.• Select vocabulary and grammatical structures that reflect what the writing requires, doing this mostly appropriately (e.g. using contracted forms in dialogues in narrative; using passive verbs to affect how information is presented; using modal verbs to suggest degrees of possibility).
• Use verb tenses consistently and correctly throughout their writing.
• Use the range of punctuation taught at key stage 2 mostly correctly (e.g. inverted commas and other punctuation to indicate direct speech).
• Spell correctly most words from the year 5 / year 6 spelling list. 
• Use a dictionary to check the spelling of uncommon or more ambitious vocabulary.
• Maintain legibility in joined handwriting when writing at speed.