Curriculum Intent

At Harcourt Primary School, we aim to provide a high-quality Science education that provides children with the foundations they need in order to recognise the importance of Science in every aspect of daily life. We believe that Science should be a hands-on, engaging, and practical experience for all children. We strive to ensure that the Science curriculum we provide offers children with the confidence, passion and ambition to continue to develop their scientific skills as they progress through their education.

Our Science curriculum aims to cultivate a curiosity in all children and while engaging in the broad science offer, the children will gain specific skills and knowledge to assist them in thinking scientifically, gaining an understanding of scientific processes, as well as an understanding of the uses and implications of science today and in the future.

We carefully follow the National Curriculum for Primary Science and through our progressive, carefully considered, knowledge-rich lessons, children build on their existing schemas, allowing them to continuously develop and strengthen their scientific knowledge, language and skills in order to apply this to new concepts, experiences and enquiries. We want to create a Science curriculum that fosters knowledge acquisition and learning development as well as to empower the children with a deep grasp of the world in which they live; we want our children to be passionate about Science.

Science learning at Harcourt Primary School is built around a well-sequenced and knowledge-rich curriculum that ensures prior knowledge is built upon as children move through the key stages: units on light, for example, are delivered in Year 3 and then again in Year 6 to ensure that prior learning can be revisited, retrieved and then built upon further. Alongside delivering a knowledge-rich curriculum, we also value and look at the practical skills of scientific enquiry. We encourage the children to ask questions and challenge their findings during scientific experiments. Our scientists seek to problem-solve, create and are always keen to explain their thinking using subject-specific vocabulary.

We give the teaching and learning of Science high prominence. Our curriculum enables children to become enquiry-based learners, collaborating through the researching, investigating and evaluating of experiences. We place scientific investigation at the heart of our progressive Science curriculum to enable the children to be equipped for life to ask and answer scientific questions about the world around them.

Implementation

As a school, we use the Grammarsaurus Science scheme as a structure on which we build our lessons. Teachers create a positive attitude towards Science learning and our curriculum is built around the principle of greater learner involvement in independent and whole-class work. It requires deep thinking and encourages learners to ‘think outside the box’ and consider different avenues for further research. They do this through exploring, talking about, testing and developing ideas. Questions are set in abstract contexts and children ask their own questions about what they observe and make some decisions about which types of scientific enquiry are likely to be the best ways of answering them, including: observing changes over time, noticing patterns, grouping and classifying things, carrying out simple comparative and fair tests and finding things out using secondary sources of information. They draw simple conclusions and use scientific language to talk and write about what they have found out.

Our Science curriculum is vocabulary-rich. Teachers check what children already know, which enables them to pitch new learning appropriately. Children build on prior knowledge and link ideas together, enabling them to question and become enquiry-based learners. Every lesson starts with a ‘flashback’ to learning from the previous key stage, previous year group, previous term and previous lesson, which encourages learners to retrieve previous learning and make links, where appropriate, to new information. There are regular opportunities within lessons for children to recall new/current learning and our teachers are responsive to addressing misconceptions in learning as they occur.