Religious Education
We prioritise Religious Education and 10% of curriculum time is given to the teaching of this subject, following the recommended Nottingham Diocese Programme: Come and See. Collective worship plays a large role within school and children and adults come together to lead and pray regularly, which children foremost taking leadership and ownership of this for our school community using the Catholic Church’s Ordo and ‘Let us Pray’ resources.
English
We endeavour to deliver an innovative English Curriculum, where excellent early language development is promoted and written and oral communication, and creativity is a high priority.
Phonics
We use the Ruth Miskin’ Read, Write, Inc approach to the teaching of phonics and early reading and writing skills. This approach is highly effective in enabling children to decode and blend words quickly as well as developing understanding and enjoyment of texts.
Reading and Writing
Reading takes a high priority throughout the school and children are encouraged to read high quality texts and to read widely and deeply for pleasure and information. We follow the Read, Write Inc Literacy and Language programme where children acquire and apply the key skills of spelling, grammar and punctuation to their writing and opportunities are regularly provided for children to write clearly and accurately at length in a range of different styles. Our Whole Class Reading approach has been specifically developed by the staff at St Charles’ with our children in mind and focuses on developing reading skills using DERIC:
- Decode – sounding out and blending of words and then becoming more confident with reading words on sight.
- Explain – asking children to explain the meaning of words and being able to explain what is happening in the text they have read.
- Retrieve – asking children questions where the answer can be found in the text or pictures
- Interpret – children are use their inference skills to use clues in the text and what they already know to make suggestions about what they have read, using ‘because’ in their response.
- Choice – asking the children questions about why the author has chosen to make particular choices linked to layout / vocabulary/ characters, within the text.
Maths
Through the delivery of our maths curriculum children become fluent in key maths skills and calculation strategies so they can confidently apply those skills in problems solving and reasoning tasks. The curriculum is designed so all national curriculum objectives are covered and revisited and links are made between areas of learning.
Creative Curriculum
Our curriculum is designed carefully to ensure National Curriculum coverage and progression of key skills. Using a thematic approach we encourage children to make links between subjects, to make learning enjoyable make tasks purposeful. This helps to fosters deeper engagement and purpose for writing and art / design and technology tasks, giving children specific knowledge in these areas. We ensure children have access to a wide range of high quality texts which support our themes and encourage love of reading.
To further support knowledge acquisition we use knowledge organisers with key information, facts and dates to help children remember and recall information linked to the topic. These are revisited frequently through a variety of different tasks and activities.
We provide a wide range of enrichment activities to support our curriculum, including trips visitors and local area studies to enhance the experience of the students in our care.
Modern Foreign Languages
Children in Key Stage 2 are taught French by a specialist Modern Foreign Languages teacher which is taught as a stand-alone subject, split into the strands of speaking and listening, writing and reading, with a strong focus on vocabulary. We follow the National Curriculum for French in all year groups in KS2 to enable children to make good progress from Year 3 to Year 6.
Physical Education
P.E is taught by both teachers and specialist sports coaches. The programmes are tailored around the National Curriculum and in Key Stage 2 these are also linked to competitive sports opportunities as accessed through North West Leicestershire School Sports Partnership.
We teach our curriculum through half termly themes, where teachers plan to teach the necessary skills in a fun and lively way as well as making links between different subject areas. On our Curriculum Overview you will find information about the objectives covered in each year group within the curriculum for this year.
