Intent

Rooted in God as our vine, our curriculum purpose is to deliver a language rich, enquiry-based curriculum underpinned by a broad range of vocabulary. The knowledge acquired through this empowers our children, enabling them to grow and is driven by high expectations for all. Learners at Bapchild have a passion for learning that enables them to make connections throughout our curriculum to become more resilient, independent and inquisitive learners. We deliver a vibrant and contextualised curriculum which fosters the spirit of enquiry and purpose in order to develop critical thinking through posing and answering questions.

Implementation

Language-rich and wide range of vocabulary

Bapchild and Tonge’s curriculum is based around having language-rich classrooms and learning, where we foster all aspects of language in our children. These aspects include learning new vocabulary and learning to use new vocabulary in speaking. Word Aware is consistently built through our curriculum planning to ensure that the children are exposed to a wide range of subject and curriculum specific language and vocabulary. We also know that writing is another aspect of a language-rich environment. Our children learn to speak and use language and then learn how to put those thoughts down in writing across the curriculum.

Enquiry-based

Many of our curriculum areas are guided by enquiry questions that provide our children with key questions in order to enthuse, engage and captivate. Many of the questions are too big to answer in one go so they are broken down during the course of each of the units. This enables them to be more ‘bite-size’ for the children which allows them to build on the knowledge they already have and make connections so that they can answer the larger unit question.

Critical thinking through posing and answering questions

Our curriculum is layered with questions for a number of reasons, whether to check for understanding, to deepen understanding and to make links across their learning. We encourage the children to pose questions and probe for answers. We believe that developing pupils’ metacognition and critical thinking skills are crucial to being resillient, independent and inquisitive learners.

Impact

Our curriculum ensures that our children become increasingly confident to use a broad and varied range of language to articulate themselves and take responsibility for their own learning. The children demonstrate the impact of our curriculum through their behaviour for learning; children are confident and successful learners now and in later life, by celebrating their achievements and sharing what they have discover.