Curriculum

At Cashes Green we have designed a curriculum combining high standards with exciting, fun and stimulating learning opportunities. This prepares our children for future education and gives them the knowledge, skills and enthusiasm to pursue learning for the rest of their lives and become happy, productive citizens. We aim to help our children be ready to meet the demands of the twenty-first century and to learn to be confident in a wider international community.

We teach a creative curriculum where knowledge and skills are learnt side by side, linking areas of different subjects together into topics. Each class has a core book every half term which they base their topic around. You can see this here.

We use our own Key Skills for each Foundation subject to plan for progression and challenge, ensuring that children develop their skills in each subject as they move through the school. By teaching in this way, children have a chance to really get involved in their learning, developing their knowledge and skills in each subject in a meaningful way which enables them to remember in the long term what they have been taught. Children learn maths, English and science in their discrete subject lessons which are linked to the topic where appropriate. We also build in as many opportunities as we can for children to practise and apply these skills within other subjects through their topic lessons.

All learning is planned from the 2014 National Curriculum, children in Reception Class follow the Foundation Stage Programme (this is our second year as we were an early adopter school), children in Years 1 and 2 follow the Key Stage 1 Programme of Study and those in Years 3 to 6 follow that for Key Stage 2. Find out about the curriculum in Reception Class here.

Through Key Stages 1 and 2, the core subjects of English, Maths, Computing and Science are taught in each class alongside the foundation subjects of Art and Design, Design and Technology, History, Geography, Music and Physical Education. Additionally, we follow the Gloucestershire Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education. Find out more about each subject by using the links above. In KS2 children learn Spanish as our modern foreign language.

Our PSHE curriculum is a huge part of our curriculum at Cashes too as we firmly believe that preparing children for life involves developing the whole child and not just their academics. We follow SCARF throughout the school and we are also proud of our rich SMSC provision, all of which you can find out about on the PSHE page. Further to this, in Key Stage 2 children complete a 'Life Skills Passport' with activities such as cycling proficiency that are extra to the statutory National Curriculum as well as activities that fall into other curriculum areas, for example cooking a healthy meal, first aid and Internet Safety. It is our aim to ensure that children leave us with the knowledge and skills needed to be successful in their next steps in both education and life.

We try to give our children as many opportunities to discover and experience for themselves in hands on learning opportunities so we provide a variety of special events in each topic to supplement classroom lessons. These activities vary from topic to topic but include trips and visitors into school as well as getting out and about in our school grounds. As much as possible we also bring classroom lessons alive with real and imaginary experiences, or the use of quality texts, which excite and enthuse the children giving them a purpose for their learning.

Here are some examples of the exciting learning in our curriculum:

Carefully chosen texts form the basis of our curriculum as an important way that we build children's vocabulary and their love of reading and stories right from their first days in Reception.

You can see our whole school overview of texts and topics for each year group here.

We link the learning in different curriculum subjects to our class text. Children find this helps them to remember more as their learning is applied to real and imaginary contexts.

Our children love dressing up to help them become immersed in the characters and themes in the stories they read.

Our children really enjoy trips out of school and visitors in to help them find out more about their topics. We are trying to get back to doing this as much as possible after the halt due to COVID-19 restrictions. 

Although we plan some of our topic in advance to ensure curriculum coverage, we also follow the children's interests and ideas. 

For example, a few years ago, Reception Class and Year 1 decided they would like to have a banquet like in medieval times! They found out what people living in castles ate, then they invited their parents along (writing their own invitations) for the party. 

Our children enjoy both real and imaginary experiences to get them enthused and involved in their learning and we find our children thrive with these real purposes for their writing in particular. 

For example, a few years ago, Year 2 found a dragon's egg! They were allowed to choose what to do with it, but had to write to convince Mrs Dawson. Then they received a book on how to look after dragons in the post. They read it carefully and wrote information texts on how to look after a dragon for their new teacher in case it hatched when she took over the class. Then, the egg hatched! Unfortunately, the baby dragon escaped but Year 2 know he is safe as a few days later they received an email from Mummy Dragon. They then found out how to send emails and wrote her replies. Finally, they found out how to trap a dragon just in case any other dragons are seen around Cashes and they made posters sharing their knowledge so everyone else would know what to do too!