Primary Curriculum

Our Primary curriculum is underpinned by our values of Heart, Mind, Connect, which relate to different aspects of character or behaviour that we seek to nurture in our students, so that they achieve personal and academic success. We encourage them to find their own unique voice, by strengthening their sense of identity, independence, self-belief and ambition.

 

The Primary curriculum has been developed as part of the academy’s 4-16 through school 5 Phases model. Year groups sit within the phases and curriculum details for each Primary year group can be accessed here:

 

Year 1 Curriculum

Year 2 Curriculum

Year 3 Curriculum

Year 4 Curriculum

Year 5 Curriculum

Year 6 Curriculum

Phase 1: Exploring

Every child should be given the opportunity to explore who they are and where they fit in the world right from the start of their education. At a young age, children are naturally curious learners and as such our Phase 1 curriculum is structured to create and craft opportunities to learn through exploration. Using a combination of provision-based learning, direct teaching and collaborative experiences the children develop their understanding of the world around them, begin to develop their own voice (learning how to articulate their thoughts, feelings and desires) and increasingly explore the world of communication via language and the printed word. 

 

Children in EYFS follow a curriculum that seeks to engage them in their learning whilst also allowing them to investigate and develop their understanding of the world through provision-based learning. Driven by the children’s natural curiosity and interests they will learn to communicate and interact with each other and the wider world. The two classes operate in conjunction with each other and have equal access to both an indoor and outdoor provision area. Each child will partake in daily phonics, maths and English lessons as well as partaking in a daily Maths Meeting as a part of our commitment to the Maths Mastery approach to teaching.

 

Activities for the children throughout their time in EYFS follow the aims and intentions of the seven areas of learning that make up the foundation stage teaching programme. These seven areas are split into two aspects as follows:

 

  • Prime areas of learning – communication and language, physical development, personal, social and emotional development.
  • Specific areas of learning – literacy, maths, understanding the world, expressive arts and design.

 

Within Year 1 the pupils will explore learning via a hybrid approach that allows them to continue to access provision-based learning opportunities alongside more formalized direct teaching approaches. The children will explore the wider world around them, looking back at early man and ancient civilisations in order to see how we have developed the world that we live in today. We are very ambitious for our children and actively engage them in their roles as global citizens at an early age by exploring themes such as recycling and pollution.

Phase 2: Constructing

As the children transfer into Phase 2 we want them to continue to use our core principals of learning and build upon these. Phase 2 seeks to enable children to ‘construct’ their education – be this constructing points of view in a discussion, constructing and creating stories or constructing their own opinions. In order to do this, the phase has three key themes for children to engage with: Creators, Storytellers and Innovators. Via these themes the children will continue to build upon their knowledge and understanding of the world – investigating areas such as forces and materials; rock formation; pioneers and front-runners in technology and exploration. They will examine female role models and the role they played. Lessons will continue to build upon prior learning with English being used to expand the children’s reading repertoire to include writers as diverse as Dahl, Donaldson, Shakespeare and Farook. The use of Voice will encourage children to express their own opinions, create coherent arguments and articulate their thoughts – all whilst continuing to build upon their role as global citizens, so that issues such as deforestation are not seen as problems for others to solve.

 

Our curriculum seeks to use both the local and wider contexts to develop their knowledge and understanding of the world around them. As a part of their learning, children will visit local historical locations such as The Piece Hall, Shibden Park and local places of religious significance. Our curriculum in this stage emphasises the key aspects of our ethos: Hearts, Mind, Connect. Throughout the three years of Phase 2 the children will experience the full range of school subjects from art to science – and will be introduced to Modern Foreign Languages for the first time, allowing them to experience both Spanish and German cultures from both linguistic and cultural perspectives.

Phase 3: Enquiring

As children enter Phase 3 their development within school continues to grow; having moved through the areas of Exploring and Constructing, the children enter the Enquiring phase. Throughout this phase the children will look at issues in greater depth and be challenged to think more critically about what they know and understand. Learning themes will encompass Pathfinders and Voyagers, bringing to life more modern historical areas such as ‘The Enigma Machine’, ‘The Windrush Generation’ and individuals such as Turing and Pankhurst. Throughout their learning the children will consider how these people changed the world around us, what barriers they had to overcome and how they coped with the prejudices that life constructed around them. Through a series of carefully sequenced lessons they will build upon prior learning, encouraged to enquire about representations of the past, to consider how today’s current geographical boundaries and structures were created and to articulate their opinions, and argue on behalf of others.

 

Phase 3 also bridges the traditional gap between Primary and Secondary allowing for a more consistent transition with many children being taught by both Primary staff and Secondary subject specialists over the course of the phase.

Character Curriculum

Through the Character Curriculum, our students learn who they are as individuals, work towards their aspirations and develop their own voice. Finding that voice means that they can find their place in the world and make a positive difference. As the children grow through the phases of the school they will be encouraged and challenged to look at a wide range of issues including: self-regulation, working collaboratively, keeping themselves safe and how to develop their learning. In addition we nurture personal qualities in our young people, such as kindness, creativity and a sense of self-worth. 

 

The Character programme runs throughout the entire school experience including: subject lessons, phase assemblies, the Wellbeing Programme, the Achievement Programme, careers education, the House System, the Enrichment Programme, the Leadership Programme, the School Council and our Big Learning Lessons – creative, active, memorable phase group lessons, which are underpinned by our values and ethos.

 

In Phase 3 the school begins to offer leadership opportunities, nurturing confidence, independence and character and enabling interaction with a wide range of people. Children will begin to work within the community from as young as Phase 1 in the community Outback project, through to Year 4 and their growing of sustainable food, onto Year 6 and the charity project. We encourage and expect our pupils to look at their role beyond the local area and consider how they can work to change the world for the better of all.

Phonics

At The Halifax Academy, we want every child to be successful and fluent readers at the end of Key Stage One. We believe that this is achievable through a combination of strong, high quality, discrete synthetic phonics teaching combined with regular, daily opportunities for developing reading skills. The teaching of phonics is a key strategy that is used to help our children to read and spell.

 

At The Halifax Academy phonics is taught through daily discrete phonics sessions. We use the Supersonic Phonic Friends scheme to deliver theses high quality phonics sessions.

 

Below is an outline of the phases and when they are taught in our school.

 

  • Firm Foundations in phonics one  (Reception) Phase 1 focuses on developing children’s listening, vocabulary and speaking skills. This phase is divided into 7 aspects-environmental sounds, instrumental sounds, body percussion (e.g. clapping and stamping), rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, voice sounds and oral blending and segmenting (e.g. hearing that d-o-g makes ‘dog’)
  • The Basics Phase 2 (Reception) In Phase 2 the children learn 19 letters of the alphabet with one sound (phoneme) each letter. The children begin to blend sounds together to make words and learn to segment words into separate sounds. The children also start to read simple captions.
  • The Basics Phase 3 (Reception) The remaining 7 letters of the alphabet are taught, one sound (phoneme) for each letter. Graphemes such as sh, ng, oi, are taught as they represent the remaining phonemes which are not covered by single letters. The children read captions, sentences and questions.
  • The Basics Phase 4 (Reception/Year 1) There are no new phonemes or graphemes taught in this phase. Children recap prior learning and learn to blend and segment longer words with adjacent consonants e.g. swim, clap

The Higher Level Phonics Phase 5  (Year 1) The children now move onto the ‘complex code.’ Children learn that there are more graphemes for phonemes (ways to write the sounds) and that there are different ways to pronounce the phonemes they have already learnt.

  • Phase 6 (Year 2) has a clear focus on spelling, including tenses, prefixes and suffixes, adding ending to words such as plurals and ing, ed, er, est and compound words.  They will also learn some further rarer choose to use spellings for the 44 sounds of the English Language.

 

Supersonic Phonic Friends Progression Document

Supersonic Phonic Friends Character Pictures & Names

 

For further information visit: www.supersonicphonicfriends.co.uk

Mathematics

At The Halifax Academy, we take a mastery based approach to teaching mathematics. This is founded in our belief that strong and lasting understanding of mathematics comes from spending significant time developing deep knowledge of the key ideas that are needed to underpin future learning. Furthermore, the structure and connections within the mathematics are emphasised, so that pupils develop deep learning that can be sustained.

 

Primary approach: https://www.mathematicsmastery.org/primary-programme-teacher-training-classroom-resources

Secondary Approach: https://www.arkcurriculumplus.org.uk/cms/assets/files/mathematics-mastery-ks3-curriculum-maps.pdf

 

Why a Mastery approach?

https://www.ncetm.org.uk/teaching-for-mastery/mastery-explained/

https://www.mathematicsmastery.org/primary-programme-teacher-training-classroom-resources

Further information

For further information about our Primary curriculum, please contact Mr Stephen Potter: spotter@thehalifaxacademy.org