CURRICULUM

At Knollmead Primary School, we ensure our whole school curriculum is rich and rigorous, and designed with our pupils and community in mind. It is carefully planned and goes hand in hand with our commitment to effective, research based pedagogy and practice.

Our curriculum intent is as follows:

● To strive for all children to become fluent and effective readers to enable them to access the wider curriculum, develop a rich vocabulary and enjoy reading for pleasure and as a door to further learning.

● To take every opportunity to develop all children’s vocabulary, committing new words and learning to their long term memory through rigorous and systematic teaching and learning within a culture of intrigue around words, their origins and application.

● To strive for all children to become fluent in number and able to manipulate number to support problem solving and reasoning.

● To provide all children with every opportunity possible to develop knowledge and skills through progressive content throughout the curriculum, to best prepare them for secondary school and lifelong learning.

● To ensure all children are able to communicate articulately and confidently in a range of forms and situations across the curriculum.

● To offer for all our children the knowledge and understanding of how to keep themselves healthy, both physically and mentally, to support their long term well-being.

● To develop all our children’s understanding of themselves as learners, and to develop their resilience and problem solving skills to enable them to link their knowledge and skills to be creative thinkers.

● To instil an understanding of and deep respect for the beliefs, cultures, needs and differences of others.

Modelled by an adult and then the child copies. To reduce the cognitive load, only the first 6 times tables are introduced.

It is important here that the child also uses their fingers to support the skip counting. This allows them to build on their times tables from 5 x ? (the fifth finger) as they learn more facts

The child copies the teacher as they cover a new multiplication fact. The process of skip counting uses constant repetition and encourages children to pronounce the facts clearly to further embed them into their long term memory.

The child is now encouraged to say the times tables out loud in order. The process of skip counting has been removed and saying (chanting) the times tables facts is introduced. The use of a tennis ball is encouraged to make the activity fun.

The chanting, or retelling of multiplication facts is now repeated but backwards. Once again the child has to say the full times tables facts, plus answer to further embed the facts in their long-term memory.

Once again the child is to say the whole multiplication fact and answer, but this time the order is randomised and the teacher dictates the questions. As the child grows in confidence division calculations calculations are also introduced. Just like in clips 5 and 6 the child does this activity using the tennis ball.

This child is now encouraged to use the multiplication facts to answer questions using the times table practice. The calculations that the child is asked to solve are made more challenging by not always asking for the missing answer, but for part of the calculation also.

The child is encouraged to use the 'distribution law' to further understand times tables. For examples 5 x 8 + 2 x 8 = 7 x 8. They could learn to solve this as seen below

5 x 8 = 40

+ 2 x 8 = 16

7 x 8 = 56