Curriculum Overview

 

 

 

Here at Nelson, community is vitally important to us. We are situated in the heart of Whitton, a multi-cultural town, with Twickenham Rugby Stadium within walking distance. Our school community includes families whose parents and even grandparents came to this school. We have families from Whitton, Twickenham and Hounslow who make up our close-knit school community and provide a range of culture, ethnicity and diversity for us to celebrate. We purposefully draw upon this community by celebrating Whitton through our geography curriculum; inviting guests to our school to enhance the R.E, music and PE curriculum; and by encouraging our children to join in with events such as food festivals, the St George’s Day Parade; and Light-Up Whitton.

Our curriculum, therefore, reflects diversity and community spirit whilst providing a solid foundation of learning for our pupils. We offer a knowledge-engaged curriculum which embraces enquiry skills and critical thinking. Our after-school provision of enrichment activities also broadens and nourishes children’s interests. From yoga to fencing to sewing to chess to tennis – there is something for everyone.

Language and reading are at the heart of all we do. Language acquisition and nurturing an interest in vocabulary is central to our approach. We place great emphasis on oracy by modelling language, celebrating home languages and teaching high-quality vocabulary explicitly. A rigorous phonics programme provides the skills needed for fluency in reading which then enables the children to develop a range of comprehension skills such as retrieval and inference which are then utilised across the whole curriculum allowing the children to learn and remember more. The children are exposed to high-quality texts throughout their time at Nelson. This ensures that the children leave here having experienced a wide canon of literature, and with a solid knowledge of authors and genres, in readiness for their next stage of education.

We are aspirational for our pupils. Our broad and balanced curriculum encompasses the full range of subjects. Each subject is distinctive with its own set of knowledge and skills. We use knowledge organisers to secure the specific knowledge and vocabulary we have identified as central to each subject, including links to prior learning.

We  summarise our curriculum intent as follows:

• Our curriculum is based on the National Curriculum.
• We have mapped out the knowledge and skills pupils will gain in each year and for each subject so that the pupils build on what they have learned.
• We have considered how the curriculum is sequenced to maximise learning. It is in a logical order and the topics are connected within each year. We focus on the children knowing more and remembering more.
• We broaden pupils’ experiences through educational visits, guest speakers, additional curriculum activities and through a variety of after school clubs.
• Our curriculum is for all children. Where children have additional needs, we put provision in place such as pre-teaching and scaffolding to ensure that all children can access the offer.
• Reading is prioritised in the curriculum. In EYFS and KS1, the pupils learn phonics through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds programme. In addition, texts have been allocated across the whole school to ensure that pupils develop fluency, comprehension and communication skills.
• Vocabulary is also prioritised. We have focused on subject specific vocabulary in foundation subjects to ensure the children use the correct terminology and are prepared for the next stage of their education. It is our intention to grow vocabulary and extend it through, beyond and across the initial curriculum experience. ​

 

We hope you enjoy finding out more about our curriculum by following the links on the left.