Intent

At Milking Bank Primary School, it is our intention to recognise the importance of Science in every aspect of daily life. We give the teaching and learning of Science the prominence it requires.

The Scientific area of learning is concerned with increasing pupils’ knowledge and understanding of our world, and with developing skills associated with Science as a process of enquiry. It will develop the natural curiosity of the child, encourage respect for living organisms and the physical environment and provide opportunities for critical evaluation of evidence.

We intend to build a Science curriculum which develops learning and results in the acquisition of knowledge and build a Science curriculum which, enables children to become enquiry based learners.

Implementation

In ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in science, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Teachers refer to the National Curriculum programmes of study and use Chris Quigley’s milestones for progression of knowledge and skills.

We ensure that all children are provided with rich learning experiences that aim to:

• Prepare our children for life in an increasingly scientific and technological world today and in the future.
• Help our children acquire a growing understanding of the nature, processes and methods of scientific ideas.
• Help develop and extend our children’s scientific concept of their world.
• Build on our children’s natural curiosity and developing a scientific approach to problems.
• Encouraging open-mindedness, self-assessment, perseverance and developing the skills of investigation – including: observing, measuring, predicting, hypothesising, experimenting, communicating, interpreting, explaining and evaluating.
• Develop the use of scientific language, recording and techniques.
• Develop the use of computing in investigating and recording.
• Make links between science and other subjects.

Science is taught consistently, once a week for up to two hours, but is discretely taught in many different contexts throughout all areas of the curriculum. For example, through English, i.e. producing leaflets to be displayed in the dentist and creating stories about space travel.

At Milking Bank Primary, we aspire to promote children’s independence and for all children to take responsibility in their own learning, therefore we have implemented self/teacher assessment sheets, which the children use as a working document to track their achievements and progress throughout a topic.

We are also in the process of introducing knowledge organisers, which will assist children with scientific vocabulary tasks, reading texts linked to their topics and ensuring that key knowledge is retained.

Impact

The impact and measure of this is to ensure children not only acquire the appropriate age related knowledge linked to the science curriculum, but also skills which equip them to progress from their starting points, and within their everyday lives.

All children will have:

• A wider variety of skills linked to both scientific knowledge and understanding, and scientific enquiry/investigative skills.
• A richer vocabulary which will enable to articulate their understanding of taught concepts.
• High aspirations, which will see them through to further study, work and a successful adult life.