Intent
At Beeches Junior School, it is our intention to provide a high quality, rich science education and to ensure every child has a positive, memorable and first-hand experience of science throughout their primary school education – making consistent links to prior knowledge and building their scientific schema through their rich experiences. Our science curriculum delivers full coverage of the National Curriculum and provides progression of knowledge from Year 3 to Year 6. It enables children to become enquiry-based learners collaborating through researching, investigating, evaluating and exploring.
Through high quality teaching, the children of our school will be equipped with the tools to ask relevant questions about scientific concepts, discuss which scientific enquiry they can carry out to research, test or explore and draw simple conclusions.
Implementation
Our curriculum is built around the principle of greater learner involvement in their work. It requires deep thinking and encourages learners to work using a question as the starting point. They do this through exploring, talking about, testing and developing ideas around everyday phenomena and the relationships between living things and familiar environments, and by beginning to develop their ideas about functions, relationships and interactions.
Through the use of ASE subject knowledge matrices, exemplar work and progression of skills, teachers have a good foundation to plan high quality Science lessons – allowing for maximum practical work. At Beeches Junior School, there is no strict scheme for teachers to follow so they have the autonomy to draw upon resources where they feel appropriate. The ASE subject knowledge documents are used to aid staff with ensuring the accurate coverage of knowledge, key vocabulary, working scientifically, building on prior knowledge and an awareness of what the next steps in learning are.
Impact
The successful approach to teaching of science at Beeches will result in a fun, engaging, high quality science education, that provides children with the foundations for understanding the world that they can take with them once they complete their primary education.
Assessment at Beeches takes many forms. At the beginning of each unit, children are encouraged to record ‘What I Already Know’ on their concept maps with the teacher proving prompts of prior learning from previous year groups. At the end of each unit, children can show what they have learnt through recording ‘What I Know Now.’ Formative assessment is used as the main tool for assessing the impact of Science at Beeches Junior School as it allows for misconceptions and gaps to be addressed quicker thus ensuring we are not allowing understanding to be built upon insecure scientific foundations.
Each year, an engaging and memorable science event is planned in line with British Science Week. In addition to this, and where appropriate, trips linking to science units are planned in to inspire our children, enrich their scientific experience and provide cultural capital.
Click on the links below for details of science coverage at Beeches Junior School
Science Day 2023
British Science Week 2022
During British Science Week, we carried out a variety of exciting experiments and completed a STEM activity to really get us thinking!
