Penns Primary Curriculum Statement

 Teaching Principles of the Curriculum

WRITING

Writing at Penns is taught through The Write Stuff approach by Jane Considine. This method allows pupils to improve their oracy and widen their vocabulary in every lesson, whilst deepening their understanding of writerly choices through the use of the shade’o’meter. Pupils love their writing lessons and can’t wait to show what they’ve learnt in their independent extended pieces at the end of each unit.  

All our writing is taught through the ‘writing rainbow’ which provides a lens for the writer to focus through in order to ensure all writing is effective and engaging for the reader, whilst meeting the intended purpose. 

The Write Stuff (Jane Considine) is based on two guiding principles; teaching sequences that slide between experience days and sentence stacking lessons. With modelling at the heart of them, the sentence stacking lessons are broken into bite-sized chunks and taught under the structural framework of The Writing Rainbow. Teachers prepare children for writing by modelling the ideas, grammar or techniques of writing.

Key aspects of The Write Stuff system include:

The Write Stuff builds pupils’ confidence with sentence structure. 
The approach widens the repertoire of writing options for pupils. 
Pupils gain and understanding of the ‘whole’ piece that they are writing. 
Organisation of their ideas and cohesion between them is strengthened.

                                     The Writing Rainbow                                            The FANTASTIC Lenses: Feeling, Asking, Noticing,                                                                                                                       Touching, Action, Smelling, Tasting, Imagining, Checking

GEOGRAPHY

MUSIC

Scheme Overview

The Charanga Musical School Scheme provides teachers with week-by-week lesson support for each year group in the school. It is ideal for specialist and non-specialist teachers and provides lesson plans, assessment, clear progression, and engaging and exciting whiteboard resources to support every lesson. The Scheme supports all the requirements of the national curriculum.

In line with the curriculum for music and guidance from Ofsted, this Scheme moves away from the previous levels and learning objective/outcome concepts to an integrated, practical, exploratory and child-led approach to musical learning.

Ofsted have stated that “We will not always know the learning outcomes” so segregated learning objectives at the start of each lesson are not appropriate. Instead the interrelated dimensions of music weave through the units to encourage the development of musical skills as the learning progresses through listening and appraising, differing musical activities (including creating and exploring) and performing.

We aim for every child at Penns to have listened and appraised the following musical genres during their school career