Curriculum For Penybont

Our ‘Curriculum for Penybont’ is designed to create;

• ambitious, capable learners, ready to learn throughout their lives
• enterprising, creative contributors, ready to play a full part in life and work
• ethical, informed citizens of Wales and the world
• healthy, confident individuals, ready to lead fulfilling lives as valued members of society

Curriculum Vision

Our school is located in the heart of our vibrant Welsh community, our curriculum is a celebration of our rich heritage and our commitment to fostering progress for every child. We recognise the importance of providing equal opportunities and breaking down barriers of deprivation, ensuring that every pupil has the chance to thrive. Grounded in the statutory curriculum for Wales, our approach embeds the Four Core Purposes at its core, guiding our learners to become ambitious, enterprising, ethical, and healthy individuals.

Through our innovative use of ‘threads,’ which serve as thematic sub-categories, our staff skilfully merge subjects into engaging, current, and responsive topic plans. This dynamic approach fosters curiosity, relevance, and deeper understanding for our children as they explore and experience learning.

Our ‘Dydd Gwener Gwych’ program harnesses the assets of our community every Friday morning, creating enriching hands-on learning experiences. Additionally, family collaboration is key, with our ‘Core Purpose Ninja Challenge’ encouraging active family engagement and support throughout the curriculum journey.

Together, we create a learning environment that celebrates who we are, supports every child’s progress, and nurtures a love of lifelong learning.

Curriculum Structure

Our highly professional, skilled and creative staff create engaging and purposeful topic plans each term to ensure curriculum coverage whilst being influenced by the voice of the pupils.

The Curriculum for Wales’ ‘Statements of What Matters’ for each Area of Learning and Experience (AOLE’s) have been creatively split into ‘threads’ as below.

This allows threads from different AOLE’s to be creatively merged together to create an exciting cross curricular whole school topic:

‘Body Rocks’ Topic:

During this recent topic, plans were created to merge the ‘Enquiry’, ‘Living Things’, ‘Health & Disease’ and Data threads from the Science & Technology AOLE together with chosen strands such as ‘Life Choices’ and ‘Managing Risks’ from the Health & Wellbeing AOLE.

Staff made this decision, due to the clear links between the threads and the exciting opportunities it presented for teaching and learning.

AOLE Coordinators meet to determine what progression within the topic and the thread will look like, before releasing to staff for discussion and agreement. These decisions about the progression of skills, knowledge, experiences and vocabulary are recorded on a ‘Thread detail’ sheet for reference in the future.

Our staff discuss each ‘Descriptor of Learning’ within each ‘Thread’ and decide if it is relevant to our pupils and if it needs extending or sharing further down our progression steps where they may not be a linked descriptor. In the example below, you will notice that there is no ‘Descriptor of Learning’ in PS1 or 2 for the ‘Health & disease’ ‘Thread’, but staff felt that it was important for our pupils to learning about dental care and nutrition from an early age and therefore planned progressive learning opportunities and experiences for the pupils.

During these meetings, staff also discuss opportunities to weave through the required. cross cutting themes of the curriculum.

Underpinning Literacy & Numeracy Skills

Literacy

We have recently invested in utilising the fantastic ‘Literacy Tree’ to develop the English skills of our pupils. The Literacy Tree is a complete, thematic approach to the teaching of primary English that places children’s literature at its core. We made this decision after researching many available options and visiting schools to discuss it’s impact on standards, engagement and progress.

Numeracy

We have recently invested in changing our whole approach to the teaching and learning of maths to one that utilises the CPA approach (concrete, pictorial, abstract). After significant staff professional development sessions with an expert in the field the pupils now have a maths curriculum that encourages depth of knowledge.