As children move up the school their knowledge, skills and confidence build. Our curriculum meets them every step of the way, keeping them engaged, challenged and learning every day.
This page gives an overview of our curriculum across the year groups.
Our Curriculum across school
Nursery Curriculum
Our Nursery curriculum is based on identifying where each child needs to begin their journey and uses documentation to guide our planning. We adopt a ‘child led’ approach to learning which focuses heavily on children’s interests and individual learning styles. Children’s interests and fascinations are interwoven into our environment; we also ensure children are given specific learning opportunities to develop key concepts as well as their knowledge, skills and understanding about the world in which they live.
Our curriculum promotes respect, responsibility and community, and has a strong emphasis on exploration and discovery. Children learn about the real world through a highly motivating curriculum, weekly visits to forest school and trips into our local area.
Reception Curriculum
The Reception curriculum is sequentially taught, enables children to build on the previous knowledge, skills and understanding and prepares them for the expectations of the year 1 curriculum. Through careful interactions and observations, staff identify where each child will start their learning journey and use documentation to guide their planning.
The children undertake a range of specific learning opportunities to develop key concepts and embed new knowledge through a carefully planned learning environment. Children’s interests and fascinations are always interwoven into both the indoor and outdoor classrooms.
Reading and Phonics
The love of reading is the golden thread throughout our school. Every child will not only leave Bolton Brow as a reader but as a lover of reading.
We aim to:
Develop happy, healthy and curious learners who read confidently and fluently
Help our pupils to develop a lifelong enjoyment of reading, taking genuine pleasure from what they read
Give our children the reading skills they need to access all areas of the curriculum
Allow all children to use reading to become immersed in other worlds both real and imagined
To create reading opportunities across all areas of the curriculum, to make it more meaningful and relevant to the children
Our phonics programme
We use a validated systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programme - FFT Success for All. This programme is followed with rigor and fidelity by all teachers and teaching assistants. Whole-class phonics lessons are taught to all children, daily in Year’s 1, 2 and Reception. To ensure that learning is embedded, revisited and reading opportunities continue throughout the day and additional phonics teaching is given to identified children. Phonics remains the main strategy that we use to approach/decode unfamiliar words and spelling across the school.
More information on phonics
Independent readers
Reading is the bedrock of every child’s education, and at Bolton Brow we aim to instil in all children a love for reading, as well as equipping our pupils with the skills needed to become proficient, independent readers.
In KS2, following on from our successful phonics programme, children have daily reading lessons focussing on the key areas of vocabulary, retrieval, inference and summarising. In addition, teachers ensure that opportunities for reading and vocabulary acquisition are embedded across all curriculum areas. The Accelerated Reader scheme is used to support reading in KS2; this ensures that all children are reading books with an appropriate level of challenge and enables us to monitor progress and give additional support where necessary.
Weekly certificates are presented in our achievement assembly to celebrate our children’s reading successes. Children enjoy a class book read daily by their teacher and have ownership of classroom reading corners. Our beautifully refurbished library ensures that our pupils have access to high-quality texts in an inviting, stimulating environment.