Science

Intent

At St Wilfrid’s, our broad and balanced curriculum is ambitious and carefully designed to give all pupils, with a particular emphasis on those who are disadvantaged or with SEND, the knowledge and skills that they need to take advantage of opportunities, responsibilities and experiences in later life. It is deliberately planned and sequenced so that the end points that it is building towards are clear and that pupils develop knowledge and skills, directly linking to what has been taught before (through the ‘Power Pyramid’), to be able to reach those end points. The end points are evidenced through carefully tracked outcomes and assessments. Pupils learn the knowledge that they need to answer subject-specific questions and are able to practically demonstrate and apply the cyclical skills that they acquire, supported by deliberate exposure to cultural capital opportunities and meaningful links between subjects. Pupils make good progress due to the expert knowledge of subject leaders and teachers, ensuring pupils know and remember more.

We want our children to be naturally curious about the world around them. Our scheme of work is ‘Science Bug’, by Active Learn. The scheme of work ensures full coverage of the National Curriculum and fosters a sense of wonder about natural phenomena. We are committed to providing a stimulating, engaging and challenging learning environment. Throughout our school, children are encouraged to develop and use a range of skills to work scientifically, including questioning, researching and observing for ourselves. We promote and celebrate these skills. We want our children to have a broad vocabulary: scientific language is to be taught and built upon as topics are revisited in different year groups and across key stages. We intend to provide all children, regardless of ethnic origin, gender, class, aptitude or disability, with a broad and balanced science curriculum.

Implementation

To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in science, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the school. Planning for science is a process in which all teachers ensure that the school gives full coverage of ‘The National Curriculum’ programmes of study for science. This includes understanding of the world in the early years foundation stage and science programmes of study in Key Stages 1 and 2. At the start of each topic, teachers take time to find out what our children already understand and want to find out. Our teachers use this to adapt and extend the curriculum to match children’s interests and needs, current events and to incorporate the use of any support staff and the resources available. We include the use of technology, wherever appropriate, to aid teaching and learning. Through teacher modelling and planned questioning we want our children to wonder about and be amazed and surprised by the world around them, particularly as we recognise that our children sometimes lack wide-ranging first-hand experiences. Key scientific language is modelled throughout lessons, enabling our children to be familiar with and use vocabulary accurately. Teachers are also encouraged to plan in trips and visitors to enhance our children’s learning experience.

At St Wilfrid’s we aspire to promote children’s independence and for all children to take responsibility in their own learning. Pupils often plan their own investigations/experiments and choose how they will record the results of these. Attainment is tracked through the ‘Science Bug’ assessments and online inputting of data for each class by the class teachers and takes into account National Curriculum expectations and ‘Working Scientifically’ skills separately.

What science looks like in our school

Our science display shows the work that the whole school did on birds. This includes evidence from the “Big Garden Bird Watch” that Year 2 did, the work around the ducklings that we had in EYFS and Year 1 and also the work done in KS2 with a visitor who brought birds of prey.

EYFS

“The children have all been experimenting with how to get the worms out of the mud. The mud is quite stiff and we don’t have any tools to dig it up with. We looked up a video and found that when it rains worms come up to the top, so we poured some water on to bring them up. I think we used a bit too much because it went very slushy! We tried a different patch with a bit less water and we were able to find some. We looked at different ways of bringing them up like shaking the ground or stomping on it. In the afternoon the slushy mud had dried a bit and we found loads of worms so it worked! After we spoke about how we need to clean our hands because mud and worms carry a lot of germs!”