If you would like to know more about the curriculum, please speak to the Class Teacher or arrange an appointment with Miss L Freestone, our curriculum lead via the office. office@montreal.cumbria.sch.uk
We believe that all of our pupils possess unique qualities; as such they have the right to succeed, recognise their own strengths and develop who they are in respectful and caring environment. As a school we place a high focus on developing children’s moral, spiritual, social and cultural understanding. Our school ethos is rooted in our Christian values, with ‘Caring, loving and learning’ together being at the heart of everything we do.
Curriculum Intention
At Montreal C of E Primary School, our intention is that our curriculum extends opportunities, raises aspiration, opens the children’s eyes to the world beyond their immediate environment, enables our children to live happy, healthy and productive lives and inspires children to learn more. Our aim is to deliver lessons which inspire the children to talk about and share their learning with their families.
We have focused upon developing our curriculum to ensure that coverage and progression across the year groups is evident. It aims to provide pupils with memorable experiences, in addition to diverse and rich opportunities from which children can learn and develop a range of transferable skills. The children's own community is used as a starting point for engaging interest. A primary focus of our curriculum is to raise aspirations, to develop a sense of personal pride in achievement, and to provide a purpose and relevance for learning. We aim to provide activities that the children may not otherwise experience. We recognise that the children need experiences which encourage them to value their own strengths, and to develop aspirations for their future and for their community.
Our PSHE scheme and regular Kidsafe lessons provide children with opportunities to discuss and learn about personal health, well-being, safety, relationships (including anti-bullying work), differences and aspirations.
Curriculum implementation
We aim to ensure that all learners enjoy their education and make very good progress in all areas of learning. Our curriculum content is grouped into a series of challenges based upon the Learning Challenge Curriculum. This scheme of work has been developed to ensure that there is full coverage of the National Curriculum. The Learning Challenge curriculum ensures that there is breadth and balance in our coverage of the National Curriculum while setting our clear progression in the skills that are being developed across the different year groups.
The concept of the Learning Challenge Curriculum is built around the idea of greater pupil involvement in their work and it encourages the pupils to use questions as starting points for their learning. The ethos that underpins the Learning Challenge approach encourages teachers to check on what the children already know, any misconceptions that they may have before inviting the pupils to think of their own learning questions that they would like to learn more about. Each Learning Challenge has a suggested 'wow' factor and a reflection activity. Opportunities have been built into the Learning Challenge curriculum to allow the children to make links with English, Maths, Computing and other subjects from the National Curriculum.
Pupils at all levels are helped to achieve their potential. Those who are most able are challenged and supported through appropriate extension activities. Those who find aspects of their learning challenging are encouraged and given targeted support to embed skills, to develop at their own pace or simply to learn in a style that best suits their individual needs.
Curriculum Impact
We use regular monitoring throughout the year to evaluate the impact of our curriculum design. Initially, teachers evaluate lessons and plan the children’s next steps. The children’s acquisition of skills in English and Mathematics are monitored through teacher assessments or NFER assessments (previous SATs assessments will be used in Years 2 and 6) each half term. We use an online tool to monitor the children’s progress in the foundation subjects. Regular pupil progress meetings are held to monitor the children’s progress and to identify any interventions that are required.
Senior Leaders and subject leaders play an important part in the success of the curriculum by leading a regular programme of monitoring, evaluation and review where impact and outcomes for all children are always central. As part of this process leaders will listen to the pupil’s voice, provide feedback which celebrates our successes and highlights areas for development. This results of this monitoring then informs our school improvement plan so that we are constantly trying to develop our curriculum design.
Below you will find curriculum intention statements for each subject.
Our Curriculum Overview
Throughout the school we think carefully about the skills that each group of children need to develop in different curriculum areas. To ensure that our children are developing specific knowledge and the progression of skills outlined in the government frameworks we have researched the skill progression for each subjects. Please view the key skills documents below which outline expectations for skills and knowledge for each year group.
When teaching Mathematics, our pupils are taught through whole-class interactive teaching, enabling all to master the concepts necessary for the next part of the curriculum sequence.
At Montreal C of E Primary School, we strongly believe that every child can learn and enjoy Maths. We strive to spark curiosity and excitement and nurture confidence in Maths. We aim to develop deep and lasting understanding of mathematical procedures and concepts, through the use of small steps learning and exposing children to a range of resources and representations.
We promote the use of precise mathematical language throughout school to enable children to communicate their reasoning effectively. This is also displayed on our working walls to support mathematical discussion and learning.
The CPA (concrete, pictorial, abstract) approach underpins our love of bringing Maths to life and learning practically, giving learning a purpose and supporting children in exploring their ideas further.
At Montreal C of E Primary School, our children study mathematics daily following the Power Maths Scheme of Learning. Power Maths is built around a child‑centred lesson design that models and embeds a growth mindset approach to maths and focuses on helping all children to build a deep understanding of maths concepts.
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Power Maths Parent Letter
Mathematics Curriculum Overviews
The long-term plans below, which are taken from the Power Maths guidance, show which areas of Mathematics the children will be covering throughout the year.
Maths Calculation Policies
Our Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) team prides itself on working closely with families to ensure the children in our Reception class receive the best care and experiences possible. Before children start our school, our staff liaise closely with parents/carers and feeder nurseries/childminders to ensure a smooth transition in to our setting.
We strongly believe that children have a right to experience a curriculum which is exciting, interesting and purposeful. We strive to develop learning through a stimulating, creative environment where all children have the opportunity to flourish.
Areas of Provision
Our carefully planned continuous provision enables children to learn new skills, explore recent learning and follow their own interests. This is done through active, hands on exploration and play based activities, both inside and out.
This provision is enhanced to make links to adult led learning, enabling children to embed learning and challenge their thinking. Adults based in the provision will support in building new skills, develop independence and model/extend speech and vocabulary. Enhancements also give the children opportunities to practise and improve skills, build engagement, motivation and critical thinking.
Curriculum
Our EYFS curriculum is based on the CUSP curriculum for Early Years Foundation Stage, which is split in to three core elements which work together to provide an engaging, challenging curriculum.
The three core elements are as follows:
- Foundational Knowledge
- Opportunities and experiences
- Structured story time planning
We use Structured Storytime as a basis for our core learning, planning purposeful, engaging learning opportunities to ensure our children receive a language rich, diverse curriculum that builds upon children's interests and talents.
Our long-term plan is supported by more detailed half-termly plans which contain specific areas of focus followed by weekly plans.
We use a mixture of teaching styles including:
- Adults based within the provision
- Whole class teaching
- Group work
- individual teaching & appropriate intervention groups to both support and challenge our pupils
In our class, subjects are sometimes taught in specific subject blocks, but mainly learning is organised in a cross-curricular way based on a variety of topics based on our Structured Storytime.
EYFS Policy
Learning to read is the most important thing your child will learn at our school. Everything else depends on it, so we put as much energy as we possibly can into making sure that every single child in our school learns to read as quickly as possible. We want your child to love reading - and want to read for themselves. This is why we put our efforts into making sure they develop a love of books as well as learning to read.
We start to teach phonics to our children as they join us in our Reception class. They learn how to 'read' the sounds in words and how those sounds can be written down. This is crucial not only for reading but it also supports them in learning to spell.
Our children will also practise reading 'red words'. These are tricky words such as 'you', 'said' and 'there'.
The children practise their reading with books that match the phonics and the 'red words' they know.
At Montreal C of E Primary School, we believe reading to children is so important. Time is dedicated every day for children to enjoy story time within their classes. The children are exposed to a range of text types such as stories, poetry and information books. This helps to build vocabulary and support their writing.
Read Write Inc Phonics
At Montreal Church of England Primary School we use the resources from the Read Write Inc scheme for teaching phonics.
We start teaching Read Write Inc Phonics in our Early Years Foundation Stage and then continue until the children have worked their way through the programme, usually this is during Year Two.
In EYFS, children will be taught how to read and write all of the sounds in Set 1 and Set 2. They will then be taught how to blend the sounds together in to worlds. Fred the Frog helps the children to blend the sounds together to read while words. Teachers use the phrase 'Fred Talk' to sound out words.
We assess all children on the scheme every half term, to ensure that they are placed in the correct group for their reading ability. This also allows us to quickly identify any children who may need some extra support. We provide one to one tutoring for these children to support them in keeping up with their peers.
All of our Phonics teachers have been trained to deliver the programme effectively.
Children begin by learning Set 1 sounds:
They also begin to learn to blend sounds together to read words.
Once children can read words, they move on to reading stories within their Phonics sessions.
Once your child knows all of the Set 1 sounds speedily, recognising them within a word to read the full word, we move on to teaching Set 2 and 3 sounds:
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Children will learn that most vowel sounds have more than one spelling. There are 12 Set 2 sounds that are made up of two or three letters which represent just one sound e.g. ay as in spray and igh as in bright.
Children will also be taught that there are more ways in which the same sounds are written e.g. ay as in day and a-e as in cake.
As the children move through the phonics scheme, they will develop into fluent, confident readers who are passionate about reading.
Children will bring home phonics books closely matched with their phonics knowledge. The children will have read these books within school and are bringing them home to share their reading success with you each week.
Phonics - Parent Information
Books to read online - Free eBook library | Oxford Owl from Oxford University Press
Supporting Phonics at home - Phonics - Oxford Owl for Home
Phonics games - PhonicsPlay - Resources