Over the last few years we have worked hard to develop a creative curriculum that engages all of our learners. We are constantly striving to improve the curriculum so that our children are motivated with a joy and love of learning. To this end all of our topics are chosen carefully to ensure not only curriculum coverage but engagement and enjoyment. Each topic we aim to include a minimum of two extra WOW days, which are over and above our curriculum. In each topic we also plan to have a “Eco” focus because we are a Green Flag school.
Some of our previous topics have included Victorians because we were celebrating our 150 year anniversary. WOW factors included dressing up as Victorians for our Harvest festival Service and for our large Victorian production at Selwood School where children perform songs, rhymes and poems. Also the older children carried out some brilliant “drill exercises” which was part of Victorian PE lessons. Our Nativity Christmas plays had a Victorian flavour and for another WOW day we visited a museum in Bath to look at Victorian toys, art museum and the museum of Bath at work.
Another topic was All Creatures great and Small which started with a WOW day – an adventure playground was set up on the school field but during the night a strange creature visited it. The children had to look for clues and decide what this creature was! Great excitement followed and wonderful designs, pictures and writing were produced because of this event. This topic particularly lent itself to creative writing, wonderful drawings and paintings and habitats of animals. Another WOW day included a trip to Brokerswood to look at plant and animal life and to develop mapping skills. The last WOW event was a visit from a world renowned photographer of wild life – he shared some fantastic pictures of tigers in their natural habitats and then spent time in each class developing photography skills, looking at plants and objects in different and unusual ways.
Our topic on Olympics finished off our academic year of 2011/12 We learnt about the history of the Olympic games, we went to see the Olympic torch pass through Frome and join in with the community atmosphere of this exciting event a real WOW day with each class visiting a different area of Frome to explore. We focused on our host city of London and learnt about some of its famous landmarks and fantastic artwork was produced by children throughout the school. Another WOW event was our own Olympic Opening Ceremony which all the children took part in.
In addition we had a fantastically interactive Maths Week organised by Mrs White. This included having parents in to talk about how they use maths at work, lots of interesting maths activities and extra resources that all children could use throughout the week. We had an open event where parents were shown how to use all the resources by their own children and a presentation was given first by the staff.
This academic year 2012/2013 we have just finished a topic called Amazing People, Amazing Jobs. We explored the school community first and there were lots of visitors into class to be questioned by the children. Our parent community came in to share knowledge about their jobs and what they involve and this led to some super follow up work, definitely events with the WOW factor. KS1 had a fabulous visit to the local police station and all classes went to a fire station in Bristol which was fantastic!!!
Currently we are working on a topic called Robots and we are all dressing up as Robots for one of our WOW events.