Key Stage 1
Our Key Stage one curriculum builds on our children’s Foundation Stage experience and leads them seamlessly into more focussed Key Stage 1 approach to learning.
All children have periods of time when they are taught by an adult, but also have closely monitored, self-directed activities set in different areas of the classroom, allowing them to develop crucial independence skills.
As the Key Stage progresses, expectations of both exploration and focussed task areas increases as children develop their preferred methods and styles of learning. In this way Key Stage 1 acts as an excellent bridge between the Foundation Stage and later years ensuring a solid foundation is laid within a seamless and completely personalised experience.
Summer Term
Create and follow algorithms, debugging programmes using Beebots.
Music – Exploring Sounds:
Singing and listening are at the heart of each lesson.
Play, improvise and compose using a selection of notes.
Art - Forest School Art:
Explore colour, shape, line and texture in nature and use it to create artwork.
Art – Textiles:
Weaving, wrapping, knotting, embellishing fabric, fabric pegging.
Design Technology - Fruit and Veg:
Learning about fruit and veg.
Design, make and taste a fruit salad.
Relationships:
How families are similar and different, what makes a good friend, making friends, who to speak to if I need help, who is special to me.
Changing Me:
Changes in humans (baby to child to adult), correct names of body parts, changes that have happened in my life.
Reading:
Goodnight Spaceman, Great Fire of London, Rainforest, Supertato.
Learning reading strategies to make reading fun, accessible and engaging.
Phonics:
Syllables, compound words, plurals, suffixes, upper/lowercase letters, alphabetical order and dictionaries, tricky words and phonics screening revision.
Writing:
Juniper Jupiter - Describe a superhero, using persuasive techniques to write an advert.
Baddies - Describing characters from fairy tales using adjectives, similes and alliteration. Using knowledge of characters and fairy tales to write a non-fiction fact file.
The Enormous Crocodile - Act out and rewrite a shortened version of the story. Learn interesting and important story structures. Make creative changes to the story to invent a new, similar story.
Forests Vs Rainforests:
Describing forests and rainforests using all 5 senses, exploring the location of forests around the world, comparing the weather in the UK and the Amazon Rainforest, discovering where animals live within the rainforests and discussing deforestation.
Great Fire of London:
Comparing London, houses and the Fire Service in the past and present, learning about Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of Biggleswade and using different sources of information to find out about past events.
Numbers 50 to 100:
Read, write, represent and order numbers 50 to 100, understand one more/fewer and 10 more/fewer, identify number patterns.
Addition & Subtraction:
Explore addition and subtraction involving 2-digit numbers and regrouping, number bonds to 20.
Money:
Name coins and notes and understand their value, represent the same value using different coins and find change.
Multiplication & Division:
Share equally into groups, doubling, link halving to fractions, add equal groups, explore arrays.
Capacity & Volume:
Compare capacities, volumes and lengths, explore litres, apply understanding of fractions to capacity.
Run, Throw, Jump:
Work on stamina, agility, coordination, balance and core strength.
Send & Return:
Send an object with a hand or bat, sending and returning a variety of balls.
Hit, Catch, Run:
HIt objects with hand or bat, track and receive rolling balls, catching.
Christianity:
Jesus as a friend; how Jesus showed friendship to others.
Judaism:
Understanding how visiting the Synagogue helps Jewish children feel closer to God.
Plants:
Understand parts of a plant, plant lifecycle, deciduous and evergreen, varieties of plants, including fruit and vegetable.
Animal Groups:
Describe and compare the structure of a variety of different animals and animal families.
Explain characteristics of wild animals and pets.
Summer Term
In Computing, children will look at the differences between PCs, Chromebooks and tablets.
We will then look at how images are created on a computer and how we can use programs to manipulate them; building the fundamentals of animation.
Music - Exploring Improvisation:
Using tuned instruments to explore and improvise/create own melodies in response to ideas and feelings.
Music - Our Big Concert:
The development of performance skills through song and singing with others.
Art:
We are looking at dip-dying and how relief blocks can help make pieces of art.
We will learn about Forest Schools and how natural materials can be used to make patterns, shapes, sculptures and texture.
Food Technology:
Exploring where certain food, such as milk and bread comes from.
Designing and making our own healthy sandwich, wrap, pitta or bagel.
Relationships:
When we should and shouldn’t keep secrets and understanding the difference between acceptable and unacceptable physical contact.
Changing Me:
Looking at body parts, how they have changed since being born (bodies and what they can do) and the Pants rule.
Reading:
Continue to make links between stories read, practice reading fluently, find key information within a text, sequence and retell stories.
Make simple inferences, justifying why a character might say something, feel or behave in certain ways.
Writing:
Continue our learning of narrative writing, focusing on expanding and using precise vocabulary, a range of conjunctions and adverbs.
We will also complete a wordless picture book study and look at newspaper reports.
Spelling/Phonics:
Continue learning Stage 3 spelling rules including contractions, suffixes and prefixes.
The Seaside:
Looking at the importance of the seaside; the weather and when/why people visit.
We will compare both UK and abroad seaside destinations, including the role the equator has in this, plus exploring human and physical features.
In History, we will be looking at transport.
The children will be ordering transport over time and comparing modern transport to that from the past.
The children will also be looking at individuals who have had a significant impact on transport.
Faces, Shape & Patterns:
3D shapes and their properties.
Measuring Capacity & Mass:
Practically exploring the units of measure, comparing amounts and reading scales.
Numbers Within 1000:
Exploring 3-digit numbers, recognising and explaining place value.
Exploring Calculation Strategies:
Looking at the different mental strategies, column addition and subtraction.
Multiplication & Division:
Focusing on the 3 and 4 times tables.
Run, Jump, Throw:
Pupils will throw and handle a variety of objects, develop power, agility, coordination & balance through running & jumping.
Send & Return:
Be able to track the path of a ball over the net, be able to hit and return a ball, playing modified games.
Hit, Catch, Run:
Hitting skills with a variety of bats, learning to hit & run to score points in games.
Islam:
How important the prophet Muhammad is to Muslims.
How important the Qur’an is to Muslims.
Animals Including Humans - Life Cycles:
Exploring a range of life cycles including the Human life cycle and the different stages of each cycle and looking at matching the offspring to their parents and changes that occur.
Plants:
Observe and record plants growing and how they change, making links to life cycles, knowing the differences between seeds and bulbs, what plants need to grow and be healthy and understand that plants adapt to their environments or grow in environments suited to them.
Phonics at Biggleswade Academy
At Biggleswade Academy, we BELIEVE that teaching phonics is a fundamental strategy to enable children to become confident and independent readers and writers.
Teaching phonics helps children to hear, identify and use different sounds that distinguish one word from another in the English Language. Phonics focuses on analytical skills for breaking the code of the written language. Pupils learn to say the sound (phoneme) that is represented by each letter or group of letters (grapheme). Pupils then practice using this knowledge to blend and segment words which enable the children to learn to read and write.
Research into children’s reading development shows that when phonics is taught in a structured way – starting with the easiest sounds and progressing through to the most complex – it is the most effective way of teaching young children to read. Almost all children who receive good teaching of phonics will learn the skills they need to tackle new words. They can then go on to read any kind of text fluently and confidently, and to read for enjoyment. Children who have been taught phonics also tend to read more accurately than those taught using other methods.
Phonics at Biggleswade Academy is taught daily in EYFS and KS1 through fun, fast-paced sessions which involve using puppets, singing and games as well as reading and writing activities.
At Biggleswade Academy, we follow the Collins Song of Sounds phonics scheme from Nursery through to Year 2 and for interventions with children with specific needs.
Pupils' progress is monitored closely to ensure all children are ACHIEVING their full potential and are becoming confident in the fundamental skills needed for early reading and writing. Children that require extra support are quickly identified and a range of strategies will be used to ensure that pupils make excellent progress.