Aims:
At Holy Family, we want to give our children the foundations for understanding the world, whilst fostering curiosity and wonder within the children. Science aims to teach our children the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to question and understand concepts and phenomena that occur in the world around them and equips them with the motivation to seek explanations for these.
Essential characteristics of a Scientist at Holy Family:
How we will deliver our curriculum:
Our curriculum distinguishes between subject topics and threshold concepts. Subject topics are the specific aspects of subjects that are studied e.g. Forces, Animals and their habitats, Materials and their properties and uses, etc. Threshold concepts tie together the subject topics into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, pupils return to the same concepts over and over, and gradually build an understanding of them.
The four threshold concepts in Science are:
Science is an essential part of learning in EYFS as it is incorporated in understanding the world. It is introduced through activities that encourage every child to: explore, problem solve, observe, predict, think, make decisions and talk about the world around them.
During their first years at school, children will:
Children will be encouraged to ask questions about why things happen and how things work. Adults will use focussed questioning to encourage children to observe, think and predict; and will help children to communicate, plan, investigate, record and evaluate their findings
In KS1, the children will begin by learning how the natural world develops through studying seasonal changes and animals and their habitats. They will also experience a flavour of the chemical and physical concepts, by studying light, forces and materials, which are in addition to the expectations of the KS1 curriculum. They will begin to work scientifically, by asking simple questions and recognising that they can be answered in different ways, observing closely, using simple equipment and performing simple tests.
In KS2, children will continue to develop and build on the threshold concepts, as part of the spiral curriculum. In particular they will have a greater exposure to the Chemical (Materials) Physical (Energy and Forces) concepts, which introduce electricity and sound, while further developing their studies on materials and their properties. Working scientifically, they will take measurements, using a range of scientific equipment, with increasing accuracy and precision, taking repeat readings when appropriate, record data and results of increasing complexity using scientific diagrams and labels, classification keys, tables, scatter graphs, bar and line graphs.