NATIONAL CURRICULUM FOR KEY STAGE 2
• promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society, and
• prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.
National Curriculum 2014 is just one element in the education of every child at Cavendish. There is time and space in the school day and in each week, term and year to range beyond the national curriculum specifications. The national curriculum provides an outline of core knowledge around which teachers can develop exciting and stimulating lessons to promote the development of pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills as part of the wider school curriculum.
STRUCTURE OF THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM
Key Stage 2
Subject Overviews
Learning Enviroments
Classroom management reflects our aim to encourage children to be independent, well organised and to develop good learning behaviours. This will require flexibility in the organisation of furniture and creativity in learning. Each classroom promotes a positive learning ethos, which is calming and open ended.
Each learning environment will contain working walls in English and Maths to aid children in their learning. The classroom environment is used to create a safe working environment which promotes good behaviours for learning and celebrates success.
PHONICS
We continue our Linguistic Phonics programme through the whole of Key Stage Two. The rationale for Linguistic Phonics is that children are taught to understand the relationship between spoken language and written words. It starts with what the children naturally acquire, spoken language, and teaches them the relationship between sound-spelling correspondences. Teaching children to read through Linguistic Phonics allows them to develop their decoding skills; this supports children in learning to blend graphemes (letters) for reading, segment phonemes (sounds) for spelling and manipulate phonemes (sounds) to develop accuracy in reading and spelling. Linguistic Phonics teaches the concept that all sounds can be spelled. We therefore do not promote silent letters, magic letters, or memorising whole words by sight. We appreciate parental support and ask that you read with your children in this way, encouraging children to use their decoding skills to read and spell.
Our teachers and teaching assistants receive training to deliver the Sounds-Write phonics programme. Sounds-Write takes children through systematic, incremental steps to teach children the 44 sounds in the English language and their multiple spellings.
wider curriculum
At Cavendish, the children are taught History, Geography, Science, Art, Design and Technology and computing alongside English and Maths.
Each term, the curriculum is underpinned by a key enquiry question such as ‘What was significant about 1666?’ and ‘What are the wonders of the UK?’
Educational workshops and visits are an integral part of our curriculum offer and an enrichment activity is planned during each theme. This can be in the form of a visitor, workshop in school or trip linked to the theme. Pupils experience ‘real-life’ opportunities through having these opportunities. Some of the enrichment activities the children have enjoyed this year include; Battle Abbey, The Toy Museum, Brooklands Motor Museum and workshops on Chinese dancing.
Reading
At Cavendish, we map out high-quality books for each year group to be used across Reading and Writing lessons.
We use the whole class texts each day in our Reading lessons to support the teaching of the main reading strategies: summarising, inference, prediction, making connections, clarifying, evaluating and questioning. Each week we focus on one of the reading strategies, with the teacher modelling how to use the strategy within the whole class book context. The children then use sentence stems to practise the reading strategy as the continue reading the whole class book in pairs. Two days a week children read a book chosen from the shelves of ‘Recommended Reads’ as seen below. These are diverse books that encompass a range of genres and expose children to many different authors.
%
of pupils achieved 9-4 in English.
After School programs
%
of pupils achieved 9-4 in Maths.
Years Established
Celebrating Success
The staff and governors of Cavendish wish to congratulate all of our Year 11 pupils for the fantastic GCSE grades they have achieved this year.
Headteacher, Peter Marchant said, "The grades that our pupils have achieved are a reflection of their hard work throughout their time at the school and they can rightly feel proud of what they have achieved through these challenging times."