Our Vision and our Oaky Curriculum
This prezi captures our yearly overview of our Oaky Curriculum and below is our vision for bringing the curriculum alive for our children. It weaves knowledge with skills and creates exciting learning opportunities for children to link their learning.
Oakwood Avenue is a school where learning comes to life. Over the years, we have made it our mission to develop our Oaky Curriculum by putting the children and our community at the heart of what we teach. We aim to challenge, question, inspire and develop our individuals, resulting in passionate, engaged learners who show independence and ownership of their learning. Oaky is our school character who was born in 2009, he comes to help children learn along with his friends The Oaklings. He has a nemesis 'Poison Ivy' who tries to disrupt learning for children and while nobody has ever seen her, her disruptive presence is sometimes seen and it is children's jobs to learn in order for her to go away!
Our Oaky Curriculum encompasses a number of core and foundation subjects and each term has a main subject driver; The 3 term approach has recently been developed with the ideas from Guerilla Education and having heard Jonathan Lear, Deputy Head of St Catherine's speak.
Autumn Term 1 – History through Oaky the Historian
Spring Term 2 – The Arts through Oaky the Artist
Summer Term 3 – Geography through Oaky the Explorer
Each year group has a question or fascinator, linked to the subject driver, which comes in the form of a learning hook; this fosters excitement and results in many questions, from the children, for them to investigate.
As the topic progresses, other subjects naturally link (and are planned for) resulting in a variety of exciting cross-curricular learning experiences. When subjects do not forge purposeful links, then they are taught discretely. These subjects include: Science, R.E, Computing, P.E and Spanish (at KS2). By the end of the topic, pupils will celebrate their learning and share outcomes in a variety of creative and innovative ways, often presented to parents and the wider school community. Individual subject leaders work within the curriculum team and ensure that there is progression of knowledge and skills from the National Curriculum within individual subjects so that it is robust and meaningful for children.
By fostering a curriculum which provides both skills and knowledge, both indoors and outdoors (and with the help of our loveable school mascot, Oaky and his Oaklings!), our children will be inspired by what they learn, be creative in their application and be passionate about their learning community and the wider world, now and in the future.
Parents/ carers can find out more about our curriculum by speaking to Miss Rachel Howard (Curriculum Lead) or Mrs Joanne Reilly, Deputy Headteacher.