Lodge Lane

Infant School

Our Curriculum

Our School Curriculum

Lodge Lane Infant School Values:

Kindness, Teamwork, Challenge, Respect, Curiosity, Perseverance

Intent

At Lodge Lane, we believe that our responsibility is to promote children’s social and emotional development as well as their academic achievement, and we believe that there are strong links between the two. We want children to become happy and confident individuals with ambition and the ability to fulfil their potential. We achieve this through our Imaginative inquiry curriculum and our relational approach. We focus on our school values of kindness, teamwork, respect, challenge , curiosity and perseverance and weave these through our inquiry curriculum. Our relational approach is based on the principle that nurturing and emotionally supportive relationships provide optimal contexts for the promotion of children's outcomes and resilience.

Our intent is for our children to leave Year 2 fully prepared for their next stage of education, having fulfilled their potential in their academic achievement whilst also being well-rounded individuals with the social, emotional and academic skills they need to continue their development at junior school.

Implementation

At Lodge Lane, we follow the National Curriculum in Key Stage 1 and Development Matters in EYFS, delivering them through a values-led approach. In each curriculum area, learners are taught the skills and content in a clearly structured way that enables them to build on prior knowledge and achieve high standards. At Lodge Lane, we teach the curriculum through Imaginative Inquiry which provides learners with a rich and meaningful context and gives them a clear purpose and reason for their learning. This also allows learners to engage with issues and questions from the real world, and prepares them for their future life.

Every day begins with a class Morning Meeting, in which children are greeted and have an opportunity to share ideas with the group. They engage in fun and purposeful activities which helps to prepare them for the school day and enable them to revisit and embed previous learning. Children finish the day with a Closing Circle, which we believe creates a calm atmosphere for the end of the day and supports school to home transition.

We use Emotion Coaching with children during moments of heightened emotion and resulting behaviour to guide and teach the child about more effective responses. Through empathetic engagement, the child's emotional state is verbally acknowledged and validated, promoting a sense of security and feeling 'felt'. This activates changes in the child's neurological system and allows the child to calm down, physiologically and psychologically.

Our relational approach forms the foundation of our Behaviour and Self-Regulation Policy, using clear teacher language and logical consequences to support children in making the right decisions and learning from times when this goes wrong. We believe that it is important for children to come up with their own class rules and spend time at the beginning of each year discussing what sort of class we would like to be and what the rules should be to help us achieve that. Collaborating with the children in this way means that they have ownership of their rules and are invested in following them.

Impact

Pupils consistently achieve highly and their work across the curriculum is of a consistently high quality. They are invested in their learning and relate what they have learnt to the real world. Reception children are ready for Key Stage 1 and Year 2 children are ready for Junior School, and have the knowledge and skills necessary to build upon and continue their strong progress in Year 3. They read widely and often, with fluency and comprehension appropriate to their age. They are able to apply mathematical knowledge, concepts and procedures appropriately for their age. They have a strong understanding of the world around them.

Our holistic approach ensures that as well as achieving academic success, children leave Lodge Lane with a high level of personal development and social and emotional skills.

 


Please click on the links below to get a closer look at our curriculum across the academic year