Science
Science at King's Court First School
Our Vision
Our vision is for children to develop enquiry skills that will facilitate a curiosity towards Science and empower children to discover. Our policy entitles every child to a broad, balanced and relevant Science curriculum which is tailored to the needs of each child within the school.
Aims
At King's Court First School our aim is to inspire children to:
- develop scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding through the specific disciplines of Science.
- develop understanding of the nature, processes and methods of Science through different types of Science enquiries that help them to answer scientific questions about the world around them.
- equip themselves with the scientific knowledge required to understand the uses and implications of Science, today and for the future.
- discover and be enthusiastic about Science.
Intent
Our science curriculum starts in the Early Years and progresses sequentially through to Year 4. In every lesson we focus on threshold concepts that ties the ambitious body of knowledge together with the characteristics children are developing.
These essential characteristics of mastery are:
A passion for science and its application in past, present and future technologies.
The ability to think independently and raise questions about working scientifically and the knowledge and skills that it brings.
Confidence and competence in the full range of practical skills, taking the initiative in, for example, planning and carrying out scientific investigations.
Excellent scientific knowledge and understanding which is demonstrated in written and verbal explanations, solving challenging problems and reporting scientific findings.
High levels of originality, imagination or innovation in the application of skills
The ability to undertake practical work in a variety of contexts, including fieldwork.
Threshold concepts are taught repeatedly throughout the curriculum, linking learning into meaningful and rich semantic schemas. In science the threshold concepts are:
Work scientifically
This concept involves learning the methodologies of the discipline of science.
Biology
Understand plants: This concept involves becoming familiar with different types of plants, their structure and reproduction.
Understand animals and humans: This concept involves becoming familiar with different types of animals, humans and the life processes they share.
Investigate living things: This concept involves becoming familiar with a wider range of living things, including insects and understanding life processes.
Understand evolution and inheritance: This concept involves understanding that organisms come into existence, adapt, change and evolve and become extinct.
Chemistry
Investigate materials: This concept involves becoming familiar with a range of materials, their properties, uses and how they may be altered or changed.
Physics
Understand movement, forces and magnets: This concept involves understanding what causes motion.
Understand the Earth’s movement in space: This concept involves understanding what causes seasonal changes, day and night.
Investigate light and seeing: This concept involves understanding how light and reflection affect sight.
Investigate sound and hearing: This concept involves understanding how sound is produced, how it travels and how it is heard.
Understand electrical circuits: This concept involves understanding circuits and their role in electrical applications.
It is our vision to inspire a lifelong love of science within our pupils. Science has changed our lives and is vital to the world’s future prosperity.
Therefore, at King's Court First School, our aims are to ensure children experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge.
We work hard to provide a rich and varied curriculum to challenge and meet the needs of our children. We believe all pupils, irrespective of needs, should be taught essential aspects of the knowledge, methods, processes and uses of science.
From EYFS through to KS2 pupils build up a body of key foundational knowledge and concepts; are encouraged to recognise the power of rational explanation and develop a sense of excitement and curiosity about natural phenomena.
Threshold concepts tie together the subject topics into meaningful schema. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, students return to the same concepts over and over and gradually build understanding of them.
Both in lessons and through our continuous provision, the retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength of their scientific knowledge.
In addition to this, our science curriculum is carefully designed to provide vital background knowledge that broadens pupils’ experiences and enhances their cultural capital.
This is designed to ensure that all pupils:
Develop scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding through the specific disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics,
Develop understanding of the nature, processes and methods of science through different types of science enquiries that help them to answer scientific questions about the world around them.
Are equipped with the scientific knowledge required to understand the uses and implications of science, today and for the future.
Our curriculum maps are carefully crafted and available in school. The curriculum content is available on our website.
Implementation
We maintain a high level of subject knowledge of science in our school by regular training and professional development for teachers and subject leaders. Teachers create a positive attitude to science learning within their classrooms and reinforce an expectation that all children are capable of achieving high standards in science.
Through our planning of problem-solving opportunities, children are encouraged to ask their own questions and use scientific skills and research to discover the answers. Their curiosity is celebrated within the classroom.
Planning involves teachers creating engaging lessons, often involving high-quality resources to aid understanding of conceptual knowledge. Teachers use precise questioning in class to test conceptual knowledge and skills, assessing children regularly to identify those children with gaps in learning in order to plan for next steps.
We build upon the learning and skill development of the previous years. As the children’s knowledge and understanding increases, and they become more proficient in selecting, using scientific equipment, collating and interpreting results, they become increasingly confident in their growing ability to come to conclusions based on real evidence.
Within each Milestone, students gradually progress in their procedural fluency and semantic strength through three cognitive domains: basic, advancing and deep. Knowledge organisers help students to relate each topic to previously studied topics and to form strong, meaningful schema.
We also encourage all pupils to use specific topic related vocabulary. Continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, provides retrieval practice for previously learned content.
Guidance from the framework of ‘Support and Challenge’ is used to plan a bespoke curriculum tailored to pupils’ individual needs to facilitate access to quality learning experiences and develop their science knowledge, understanding and skills.
Impact
The successful approach at King's Court First School results in an engaging, high-quality science education that provides children with the foundations and knowledge 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.
Recognising Science at King's Court First School
A child's perspective
This is what our children say about Science:
“I enjoy science because you get to learn about new thing like the human body”
“I like science because you can do experiments”
“I like science because we always learn new facts”
“I like science because I get to learn things that I didn’t know before”
“We learnt about igneous rocks and how they come out of a volcano”
“You can find science challenging because there’s a lot of different words”
“Science is challenging because there is so much we don’t know”
“I like science because the teacher’s make sure it is fun”
“The reason I like science because there is so much in around us that we don’t realise is using enquiry”
“I like doing concept cartoons about different sand”
“We don’t always learn knowledge from the past we look to the future”
Science Whole School Resources
