Catherine Junior School
Science
Intent
At Catherine Junior School, our curriculum is designed to provide, through inspiring and engaging experiences, the knowledge and skills to become independent, life-long learners. We recognise that science is essential to everyday life: it is critical to the understanding of medicine, climate change, technology and engineering. For our children to function successfully in the world around them, they must have a secure understanding of scientific concepts.
We teach science weekly with lessons focussing on developing children’s scientific knowledge, conceptual and disciplinary understanding.
Aims and Objectives
We believe that every child can master an understanding and love of science, with the right teaching and support. At Catherine Junior School, we have high expectations to enable excellence for all and we base our teaching on the belief that all children have the potential to succeed. All aspects of our eight values in the Catherine Code underpin our curriculum, which promotes our school motto and ethos of ‘Together, we can do it!’ Our curriculum is led by our whole school core principles of oracy, reading, experiences and memory and recall.
We aim to develop learners who:
- Work and think scientifically, in a variety of ways.
- Have a broad scientific view of the world around them.
- Explore, talk about and develop ideas about everyday phenomena and link it to their experiences.
- Connect knowledge to other things they have learnt and recall what they already know to apply knowledge gained.
- Ask questions about what they observe, both inside and outside of the classroom, using their oracy skills.
- Independently set up fair and comparative tests to answer scientific questions.
- Draw conclusions from tests and observations, using key scientific vocabulary.
- Find patterns within their data and observations, analysing the relations and interactions that occur.
- Sort, group and classify objects in a variety of ways.
- Use their reading skills to do secondary research to support their findings and deepen their understanding.
- Have a growth mindset and a positive ‘can-do’ attitude towards the subject of science.
- Use the Catherine Code and are supportive, resilient, collaborative, enthusiastic, motivated, respectful, thoughtful and valued.