Intent

• To enable children to learn, in an exciting, child-led way, about the world around them.
• To ensure children learn through exploring, talking about, testing and developing ideas about everyday phenomena and the relationships between living things and familiar environments.
• To ensure that children are encouraged to ‘work scientifically’, where enquiries are increasingly child-led and children gain experience of being a scientist.
• To ensure that children are exposed to the different skills and enquiry types – ensuring they are enquiring through a variety of ways.
• To ensure that there is a visible learning journey for all learners that show both coverage and progression through the curriculum.

Curriculum

All areas of the science curriculum must be covered in the given year group. See attached table for your reference. Please highlight objectives as you incorporate them into planning/cover them so that you are not left with any gaps at the end of the year. Progression through a science enquiry needs to be evident in their books (where possible).

Should there be objectives within the curriculum that are impossible to fit into your enquiry questions then either do a small science-based enquiry (could even be over a day or two!) or create two shorter enquiries (instead of just the original) to accommodate for the science.

See attached for list of skills and enquiry types to be covered – please also highlight these to ensure that the children are learning each skill and conducting a range of enquiry types.

Each unit should have one over-arching question or a series of smaller questions to reach an objective. These should be displayed somewhere on the enquiry learning wall.

Prior Knowledge elicitation – Each unit must begin with an activity to assess any prior knowledge. This will help avoid teaching content in which they may already be secure. There a number of ways you could do this:

• Allow time to explore the resources (e.g equipment for circuits).
• Create a ‘Wonder Wall’ where children use post-its to record what they already know about the upcoming unit (Also allows them to pose questions).
• Create an ‘I know…I wonder…How does….What if….?’ table.
• Break down a subject by learning objectives – are they already part way along the learning journey?

Photos of this elicitation and the post-it notes should be displayed in the floor book. Their elicitations must inform your planning in regards to the starting point and pitch. 

Science skills – Working scientifically

All LFs need to be science skills based (Planning, Observing, Recording, Concluding or Evaluating). If you are doing more than one on these over the course of a lesson, you can simply put ‘Investigation’ as your LF with the individual skills as subheadings.

For those lessons where you are recording your research (e.g labelling a diagram with an explanation), avoid ‘Explanation’ as an LF as this is a writing LF. In this case, use ‘Researching’ as your LF as research is one of the enquiry types.

When you are identifying, classifying or grouping using Venn/Carroll diagrams etc. you should use ‘Identifying’, ‘Classifying’, or ‘Grouping’ as you LF. When you are teaching the children purely the skills of how to use a Venn or Carroll, the LF will be ‘Venn’ or ‘Carrol’ because it is an area of maths that is now purely taught and assessed in the science curriculum. Physical evidence of this could also be documented in the floor books (see Floor Books section).

Enquiry types –

In addition to ‘working scientifically’, coverage of the following enquiry types is also statutory.

*Observing over time can run over more than one term. For example, time-lapse photography of plants/trees growing, time-lapse photography of the height of the sun in the sky across each season, weight/height of children etc