Curriculum

St John the Evangelist R.C. Primary School provides a broad and balanced curriculum for our pupils. Our Catholic faith is at the heart of everything we do. We teach RE lessons to learn about religion and find out what we can learn from religion in the way we live and treat each other.

Our curriculum is tailored to the needs of all learners. Whilst delivering the statutory content of the National Curriculum, our school places significant emphasis on creating meaningful, real-life experiences that will provide a solid foundation, from which children can continue to learn and grow. We love to invite visitors into school and explore our local area and further afield. Our curriculum ensures that children make progress with their learning from their starting points and continue to build on this as they move through the school.

We aim for our children to:

• Develop inquisitive minds, a spirit of curiosity and a passion for learning
• Be equipped with the skills to fully participate in an ever changing world
• Be respectful and productive members of the community
• Have high expectations and self-belief to enable them to fulfil their potential.
• Reflect on their learning and seek to extend themselves mentally, physically, and spiritually
• Uphold the Catholic ethos of the school whilst respecting their own cultures and beliefs and those of other people
• Persevere and learn from their mistakes
• Develop an understanding and respect for the environment and God’s creation
• Have the courage and confidence to take calculated risks.

Key Stage One Reading

We use a teaching programme called Read Write Inc. (RWI) to teach our children to read and write. RWI is a phonics complete literacy programme which helps ALL children learn to read fluently and at speed so they can focus on developing their skills in comprehension, vocabulary and spelling. We begin the programme in EYFS and will continue teaching RWI to children until they can read fluently.

RWI was developed by Ruth Miskin and more information on this can be found here.

Maths Curriculum

At St. John’s, it is our aim to ensure that our children know more and remember more about each concept within Mathematics as they progress throughout school from EYFS up to Year 6 and beyond. We ensure that our Mathematics curriculum has the three levels of knowledge (Declarative, Procedural and Conditional) at the heart of it and that our children receive quality first teaching that is well-planned to ensure they commit knowledge and learning into their long-term memory. It is important that that we understand the difference between the knowledge and skills that each lesson contains, and that heavy emphasis is placed on what children need to know and pay attention to rather than the way in which this is done. We know that practise makes permanent and therefore provide children the opportunity to practise and build on knowledge to avoid cognitive overload and retain information more thoroughly. 

As a school, we have decided to implement White Rose Maths as a basis for our Maths curriculum. The White Rose schemes of learning are designed to support a mastery approach to teaching and learning as well as to support the aims and objectives of the National Curriculum. The White Rose schemes have number at the heart and a lot of time is spent reinforcing number to build competency. It also provides opportunities to build reasoning and problem solving into each lesson. White Rose believes that ALL children, who are introduced to a concept, should have the opportunity to build on their abilities by following a concrete-pictorial-abstract approach.

Concrete – children should have the opportunity to use concrete objects to help them understand what they are doing.

Pictorial – alongside this, children should use pictorial representations. These representations can then be used to help reason and solve problems.

Abstract – Both concrete and pictorial representations should support children’s understanding of abstract methods.

Click here for more information about White Rose Maths.

In addition, we work in partnership with the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) to further supplement our Maths curriculum where we work in partnership to enhance the Maths provision within school and improve pupil progress and attainment.

Should you wish to request further information about the curriculum offer at St. John’s, please don’t hesitate to contact the school office on 01204 333440.