Science Curriculum          

 Aims

At Victoria Primary School, our children are SCIENTISTS! 

Our aim is to ensure that each and every child accesses a broad and balanced science curriculum which enables them to confidently explore and discover what is around them, so that they have a deeper understanding of the world we live in and the part they play in securing its future. We want our children to love science, to remember their science lessons in our school and to embrace the scientific opportunities they are presented with. 

Our curriculum is designed to ensure that children are able to acquire key scientific knowledge through practical experiences; using equipment, conducting experiments, and being able to formulate and explore these scientific questions confidently.  

The school and local environment are used as a rich resource for scientific stimuli and investigation as meaningful starting points to the children. Our expectation is that these experiences will help every child secure and extend their scientific knowledge, key skills and vocabulary, as well as promoting a love and thirst for learning. We hope that through talking about science and using scientific vocabulary, this will develop the children’s confidence in the subject matter when asking and answering questions. 

At Victoria Road, we want to prepare all children for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life by giving them the best experiences we can during their time with us.

Implementation

Our science curriculum follows an inquiry based approach and each unit poses a scientific question to spark curiosity in our children and encourage them to discover and begin to ask their own scientific questions.

We begin each unit by linking learning to prior knowledge - ‘What do I already know about this topic?’ and builds on this, as children work through a sequence of key learning points in each unit. Within each unit we follow the journey of ‘Link it’, ‘Learn it’, ‘Check it’, ‘Show it’, ‘Know it’ (Make it stick) to ensure children are linking to previous learning, learning key pieces of new knowledge, demonstrating their understanding and then rehearsing skills in order to reinforce this new learning and ensure children know and remember more with each unit they explore.

We have key identified vocabulary in each unit and encourage the use of this when talking or writing scientifically. Children are able to develop this knowledge and explore ideas further by using and developing key scientific skills of investigation.

We try to make science lessons as practical and hands-on as possible to allow children to reach their own conclusions and question theories. We encourage a high level of presentation with a varied range of ways to present findings or learning points. 

We ensure there are a number of retrieval opportunities throughout the term to revisit previous learning to see what we can remember to support us in bringing to mind these previous learning points and cement them further in our long term memory. 

 Impact

The successful approach to Science at Victoria Road will result in a fun, engaging, high-quality science education that provides children with the foundations for understanding the world. 

Our engagement with the local environment ensures that children learn through varied and first hand experiences of the world around them. So much of science lends itself to outdoor learning and so we aim to provide children with a variety of opportunities to experience this. Through various workshops, trips and interactions with experts and local charities, children have the understanding that science has changed our lives and that it is vital to the future of our world.

Pupil voice is used to further develop the Science curriculum, through questioning of pupil’s views and attitudes to Science to support the children’s enjoyment of science and to motivate learners.