Subject Overviews
Curriculum Rationale
At St Thomas More each subject is valued and taught distinctively to ensure children are given the opportunity to gain a wider understanding of the discipline.
Key themes are sequenced from EYFS to Year 6, in each subject, and spiral throughout topics to ensure children are reviewing prior learning as well as learning ‘new knowledge.’ These themes allow for knowledge to be ‘chunked’ to avoid cognitive overload thus ensuring new knowledge is retained (E.D. Hirsch Jr, 1998).
Underpinning our philosophy for devising the curriculum in this way is the work of Anderson (1970) who found that children learn best through developing a schema – a mental structure of ideas/words, a framework representing some aspect of the world.
Therefore, our themes act as the catalyst for developing schemas which children can refer to when needed.
We are passionate about delivering a rich, broad, diverse and purposeful curriculum for all children. Following this model, ensures we are narrowing gaps between all groups of children.
The curriculum is our progression model and knowledge, both substantive and disciplinary, are planned, taught and assessed explicitly. This ensures thoroughness in both the sequencing and the teaching of the curriculum.
The curriculum is knowledge structured as narrative over time.