CURRICULUM

Curriculum

Throughout school, the curriculum is carefully planned to develop a wide range of skills and knowledge which extends beyond the requirements of the Primary National Curriculum and Early Years Curriculum.
Our long term plans have been developed to deepen and enhance local knowledge, so that children develop a sense of community and a context to hinge their learning upon. Our curriculum intent is to develop the children’s sense of community, to enhance their breadth of language and to offer them the practical experiences that will enrich their learning and enhance their motivation.
All children have a daily reading session and, in Early Years and Infants, a daily phonics session.

Phonics is taught as a whole class and application to a reading book is done in ability groupings to ensure children have opportunity to develop a deep understanding of phonics and are able to apply this to their reading and spelling. 
We use a range of reading material across the school to provide opportunity for children to develop a love of reading as well as the skills they need to become fluent readers. We use reading books matched to our chosen systematic synthetic phonics programme for our early readers, and later standard Book banding to ensure children are reading at the appropriate level and making progress. Books at each band are drawn from a number of schemes and ‘free reading’ materials. These are the books children take home to enjoy reading with their family or independently.

At Forest Hills Primary School, we use a topic based approach to the wider curriculum, ensuring that learning is a holistic experience for our children. We have developed a two-year rolling programme to ensure coverage with mixed year group teaching. This builds upon the children’s prior knowledge and enables children to make links between key concepts and ideas.

We ensure our curriculum offer is accessible to all pupils including those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.