Intent
We aspire for every child at Great Barton to develop a love of learning, by offering a rich, well-sequenced curriculum that ensures progression of key knowledge and skills. We aim for children to build upon their individual strengths and talents and to become confident, independent, happy and healthy citizens.
Our aim is for our school to become a place where we can all develop both spiritually and morally, in turn becoming better prepared for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of life.
One of the key values at Great Barton is promoting the belief that every child ‘can do’ great things in their lives.
Curriculum Enrichment
We believe very strongly that education must be engaging for the pupils, and we offer many opportunities for enrichment through visits and visitors, special days, special weeks (eg art week, environmental week, global week) and additional sporting, musical and arts activities.
Younger children take part in weekly ‘Forest Schools’ activities in ‘Happy Wood’, our woodland area named by the children, and all children take part in well-planned outdoor activities. Older children take part in 'Forest Schools' sessions in blocks of 6 weeks, three times a year.
We use the outdoors across the curriculum and are in the process of developing The Hub, which will be a multi-purpose area, including a kitchen and kitchen garden.
Collective Worship
We are a church of England school and work closely with Holy Innocents' church in the village. We focus a sequence of Christian values across two years in our collective worship sessions.
Music
The children are encouraged to play a musical instrument. In year 4, the children all learn to play the clarinet as part of the Whole Class Music Ensemble teaching provided by the County Music Service. For children who wish to continue to play the clarinet after year 4, pupils have the opportunity to "play on" throughout years 5 and 6. Children regularly perform to the whole school in Collective Worship, participate in musical concerts and perform at special events during the school year e.g. playing at the Christingle Service.
We have a school choir who sing a range of songs and enjoy singing to the rest of the school.
Sports
The school is a member of the Gipping Valley Sports Partnership. This provides us with a number of benefits including access to inter-school competitions, coaches, before and after school sports activities, access to visits from Olympic athletes, training for our Play Leaders, a qualified and very experienced sports coach who provides CPD to all staff as well as high quality PE lessons.
Phonics teaching
We follow Little Wandle Letter and Sounds.
Reading Schemes
We use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds phonetically decodable books. Once children have completed their phonics and early reading, we have a wide range of reading books and schemes to suit individual learners.
Reading culture
We have a new library in the school, which has an extensive range of non-fiction and fiction books. We are in the process of auditing our texts to ensure that there continues to be diverse and offer examples of good role models. Every child will bring home a book which is not phonetically de-codeable for their parents to read to them at home in order to encourage a love of learning.
To find out about curriculum planning for each year group, please click on the links below.