Intent

Hadfield Infant School is the ‘Sunshine School’ where staff and children are happy to be there, learning and growing together.  We create an environment which enables everyone to reach their potential, through memorable, positive and fun experiences to promote independent life skills.

We believe that every child is equally valued, regardless of their starting point in life or barriers to learning.  We provide a warm, caring, nurturing and secure environment in which children can learn and thrive as individuals.

Our curriculum is designed to underpin this ethos.  It is broad, balanced and creative, enabling every child to be nurtured and inspired to reach their potential.  With the addition of our parallel curriculum we teach children to be safe, healthy individuals who support each other and their community whilst attaining highly across a wide variety of different subjects.  We aim to create a language rich environment and prioritise the teaching of specific vocabulary to enable children to have the ability to recall, use and apply the knowledge they learn (this is known as 'Curriculum content').  Our children have the opportunity to shape the curriculum and we promote beyond the classroom experiences to enhance their time in school.  We believe that reading gives children the key to access learning and our aim is to foster a love of books and reading across the school.  We use the Little Wandle scheme to teach phonics, supported by phonetic and decodable reading books, a wide range of reading scheme books and a variety of other texts.

See our Topic Curriculum Map, Sticky Knowledge for subject areas and Curriculum Policy Policies.

Implementation

Our carefully devised curriculum balances the National Curriculum expectations and a wide range of creative and cultural experiences, allowing our children to flourish both academically, socially and emotionally.  Clear planning allows the curriculum to be progressive and continuous in all aspects, but with flexibility built in, ensuring that it fits both the context of the school and children’s needs and interests.  Age related expectations combine acquisition of knowledge and development of skills to create a purposeful and exciting learning journey for every child.  We aim to deliver real, purposeful experiences for our children by providing varied opportunities to learn beyond the children’s usual classroom, through forest school, walks around the local area, working with outside professionals and school visits offsite.  Our curriculum has high expectations to blend transferable skills, demonstrate a breadth of vocabulary and develop strong cross curricular links.

Inviting, informative classroom environments stimulate and engage quality learning and foster a love of language and books. This in turn promotes and motivates children’s independent learning.  Explicit daily, weekly and termly plans are responsive to children’s needs; incorporating holistic approaches to teaching and learning (Curriculum Topic Map (termly plan) and curriculum content (medium term plan)) are available on the school website.

Children have opportunities to learn and work individually, in pairs, small groups and as a class.  Teaching groups are flexible and closely matched to children’s needs.  Targeted feedback and marking are used to ensure that all children make progress and understand the next steps in their learning.  We ensure that parents are kept informed with their child’s progress so that they can support learning at home.  If children are off school for any reason they can access tasks through ClassDojo, an on line learning platform and communication tool.

Please find below our curriculum plans for each individual year group, these topics are repeated every year.