Curriculum
Here you can find out about our approach to the curriculum at Holbrook. The links will take you to specific information about each subject area. For further information about the subjects taught in our curriculum you can access the National Curriculum for KS1 and KS2 (Click here). If you have any questions or would like to know more about what your child learns at Holbrook, please speak to your child’s class teacher. See below for our curriculum intent and implementation.
Our Curriculum: Intent
At Holbrook we seek to provide exciting learning opportunities for children to foster enthusiasm for learning. We believe that the curriculum should help children to experience 'life in all its fullness’ so our thematic curriculum includes regular opportunities for enrichment including visits, theatre trips, visitors into school and outdoor learning in our wonderful setting. We aim for a curriculum which is broad and rich to help children find their talents and passions. We have designed and personalised our curriculum to ensure that all children leave us with a wide foundation of knowledge, the necessary skills to be successful, lifelong learners and a passionate curiosity about the world around them. A focus on 'cultural capital' in every subject area helps us to ensure that children experience the best of what has been thought, said, achieved or created.
Our curriculum is based on these key principles:
- A commitment to academic excellence
- Increasing children’s cultural capital through rich learning experiences
- Celebrating and encouraging creativity
- Teaching the necessary skills and attitudes for effective, sustained, independent learning
Our Implementation through routines:
At Holbrook, we deliver our curriculum through routines. Our routines have been carefully designed, developed and adapted in order to distil them in to their key components and provide a clearly recognisable, research-based and context-specific structure to our lessons and learning sequences.
Each routine provides a basic outline for building and enhancing learning in their specific subject areas whilst also enabling flexibility to allow teachers to continue to adapt lessons to their own strengths as well as their children’s unique needs each year.
By using simple, clear symbols, children are consistently reminded of their progress through a lesson and a subject whilst also having the expectations for independence and effort subtly and regularly reinforced during their learning.
Furthermore, these routines provide consistency across all classes which enables smooth transitions between year groups (including those split across classes) and a clear framework for analysing and improving the effectiveness of the different stages within our lessons.
Our aim is for every class to use consistent routines for their learning with recognisable, visual symbols which enable children to be aware of and understand the entire process of engaging with new content. In most lessons, the symbol for the stage of the process that the children have reached is displayed or referenced in order to support this.
Through using our routines, we aim to maximise pupil learning in lessons and sequences of lessons; support children in developing their independence and passion for learning; provide a framework for analysing lessons to support the continual professional development of all staff; and create a viable, research-based and context-specific approach of learning to meet the needs of all our pupils.
Holbrook Values
Inspired by the Christian faith, we have six Holbrook Values to support development of the whole child. These are key drivers in the curriculum - we make links to them through the texts we chose to focus on, through assemblies and shared activities and we use them to make links between curriculum subjects. We want the children of Holbrook to be:
respectful
kind
resilient
reflective
empathetic
courageous