Science
At Slip End Village School, we value science, we are SCIENTISTS!
Children are given the opportunity to explore, question and investigate the how’s and whys of science. To learn by making mistakes and by continuing to be inquisitive about the world around us.
We cover the 3 disciplines of science, chemistry, biology and physics with all pupils being taught to develop their knowledge and scientific enquiry skills.
With the use of our bespoke science laboratory we are able to look at the world around us, actively research through practical experiments, make our own hypotheses and act upon these and then offer solutions to our own questions, bringing science to life.
Within each topic, we look at real life scientists and discover how they have changed the world! We use this to inspire and encourage our love of learning and who knows, maybe one day it will be us!
“The important thing is to never stop questioning” - Albert Einstein
We encourage all our children to be inquisitive throughout their time with us and beyond. Our Science curriculum fosters a healthy curiosity about our universe, a sense of awe and wonder, promoting respect for the environment. Science in our schools is about developing an understanding of science and our world, making sense of our environment, primarily through first-hand experience, exploration, interaction with scientific phenomena, and developing scientific language.
Using our curriculum, children will leave primary school with the ability to work
scientifically, having the confidence and competence in a full range of practical skills within
excellent scientific knowledge and understanding, which is demonstrated in written and
verbal explanations.
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less." – Marie Curie.
The Chris Quigley Essential curriculum provides the foundation for our science curriculum
and a framework onto which staff supplement and extend through additional planning and
resources from Hamilton, Twinkl, Enhancing Primary Science and Explorify.
• In Early years, Science is covered by the Understanding of the World area of the
curriculum.
• In Key Stage 1 and 2, there are two explicit lessons of Science per week
Enrichment weeks
• We have three curriculum enrichment weeks across the year and cover STEM
subjects - engaging the children with passionate and original thinking, solving
challenging problems and reporting scientific findings.
The Chris Quigley curriculum allows for concepts to be revisited through each of the
milestones across KS1 and KS2. This ensures breadth and depth of study and covers all
areas of the national curriculum.
Our Science curriculum has been designed to balance the knowledge that children require
to understand their universe with the hands-on enquiry skills required to investigate it. We
want to ensure that our children are creative and innovative in their thinking, inspired by
curiosity about the world. We want them to learn and discover about themselves, each
other, our community, and the environment. Our children are brave enough to embrace
challenges, failure, and perseverance in order to strive for excellence.
We live in an increasingly scientific and technological age where children need to acquire
the knowledge, skills and attitudes to prepare them for life in the 21st Century.
In Science, assessment takes place by:
Assessment is ongoing through classroom observations, tasks including low-stakes
testing, end of unit quizzes and retrieval practice against the threshold concepts.
Assessment is recorded on the Depth of Learning module and pupils are measured as
having either ‘basic’, ‘advancing’ or ‘deep’ levels of understanding at their appropriate
milestone.
As a result of our science curriculum, our children will have a curiosity about our universe
and will have gained confidence and competence in a full range of practical skills within
scientific knowledge and be able to use scientific language.
Specific teaching strategies that are used in Science are:
• Recap of previous lessons and what have we learnt questioning at the end of each
session
• DIRT time (Do It Right Time)
• End of unit quizzes
• Echo reading
• Checking understanding of texts and experiments through questioning and
exploring
• VIPERS
• Retrieval practice
• Experiments
• Across the curriculum, science topics to be used as retrieval questions
• Use of the Chris Quigley knowledge webs and the Depth of Learning assessment
module
