Our Curriculum
at Meadstead
We also have planned in several enrichment days/weeks that celebrate British Values, religious festivals and cultures from around the world. In 2024 -25 we will be hosting World Book Day, National Science Day, National Sports Week, Comic Relief, Children in Need, Chinese New Year, Eid, focused reading days, Christingle, Harvest Festival, Christmas Week and Easter to name just a few, more to be announced as the year progresses.
Our youngest children in the Academy will continue to follow their own bespoke curriculum (designed with the needs of our children in mind) that encourages them to develop a variety of basic skills through fun themes and play linked to these themes (one topic covered each learning block). The FS team will assess the children regularly to ensure that they are making progress and this is often done by taking pictures and videos of the scholars in action and also the work that they produce using a system called Early Essence. Further information about the Early Years Foundation Stage can be found in the EYFS policy which can be downloaded from the policies page.
We are proud of the end result of our work and think that we have come up with an Inclusive, Inquisitive and Innovative Curriculum as well as a robust way of checking children are knowing more and remembering more. Our curriculum isn't just about what happens in our classrooms either, our children are learning from the moment they step over the threshold of our academy - we have clear academy rules and expectations, we talk about the academy culture of high aspirations in our assemblies and we actively model and teach the children how to behave in a variety of social situations.
Deep Learning
We want our learners to progress from new learning to deep understanding.
We define deep understanding as:
Pupil’s long term retention.
Pupil’s ability to apply learning in a variety of contexts including unfamiliar contexts.
It is about pupils knowing what they know and how to apply this.