We are Learners!
In St Martin's our mission is to be a place where children
"Love to Learn and Learn to Love"
We have designed a bespoke curriculum for St Martin’s Catholic primary school.
Our aims are
- To provide a Catholic education based on the teachings of Jesus, in which Gospel values underpin everything we do.
- To promote the full potential of each child through a curriculum which develops the spiritual, academic, social and emotional growth
- To provide an enriching and challenging curriculum which gives children the opportunity to experience learning in a wide ranges of contexts broadening their horizons
- To prepare them for opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life.
Our curriculum is designed as a ‘Knowledge bank’ which provides opportunities develop and apply skills. The design ensures that there is progression of knowledge in each subject across all year groups.
We are committed in developing mastery in all subjects. This is achieved by building intelligent repetition of content into our curriculum as we recognise that children need to be able to retrieve core knowledge quickly if they are to use it efficiently. Therefore, we block our curriculum so that knowledge can be learned intensely and then content is revisited through interleaving activities and Friday Quizzes. Our curriculum plans include content repetition and opportunites to practise developing children’s procedural memory. Our yearly overviews for each class be found at the bottom of the page.
What we want children to know is clearly mapped out in our curriculum grids, we believe it is important to give our children lots of well-connected knowledge as it’s the connection between facts that gives understanding and leads to the development of crucial skills such as problem solving and critical thinking.
Reading is the backbone of our curriculum alongside the development of vocabulary in each subject area. Cross curricular links are made when opportunities naturally arise this helps children to make links between knowledge and skills acquired and this means that the knowledge and skills are transferable to all areas of the curriculum.
The curriculum is designed as such to be relevant to our children and address current events when necessary. We want our children to be critical thinkers, problem solvers and to have an informed understanding of local, national and world issues.
Our curriculum is inclusive and we address each child’s barriers to their learning so that all children are given the same chance to succeed. We place a high focus on children’s mental health and wellbeing and support this through a nurturing environment.
The implementation of our curriculum, inspires excitement and promotes a love of learning focussing on creativity and growth mindset skills.
In St Martin's we know that a consistent appraoch enables children to focus more on their learning and less on the logistics of lessons, therefore we have devised the St Martin's Way.