Intent
Science at Winterbourne Nursery & Infants School aims to teach our children the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to question and understand concepts and phenomena that occur in the world around them and equips them with the motivation to seek explanations for these. Children learn the skills required for scientific enquiry through a Cross Curricular Learning and they will begin to appreciate the way science will affect their future on a personal, national and global level. Science lessons at Winterbourne Nursery and Infants school follow a mastery approach, which aims to reach each and every child in our school. Through mastery, all pupils are able to access their learning and be successful. Through effective questioning, pupils develop their reasoning skills and explain their understanding of the world around them.
The aims of science are to enable children to:
- Ask and answer scientific questions
- Plan and carry out fair scientific investigations, using equipment including computer
- Know and understand the life processes of living things
- Know and understand the physical processes of materials, electricity, light, sound and natural forces
- Know about materials and their properties
- Evaluate evidence and present their conclusions clearly and accurately
Implementation
Our science planning is topic based as part of our integrated curriculum approach. The National Curriculum is used as the basis of curriculum planning. At Winterbourne Nursery and Infant School have planned the topics in science so that they build upon prior learning. We ensure that there are opportunities for children of all abilities to develop their skills and knowledge in each unit and we also build progression into the science scheme of work; so that the children are increasingly challenged as they progress through the school. Science is taught through a mixture of whole-class teaching and individual/group activities. Teachers encourage the children to ask as well as answer scientific questions. The children have the opportunity to use a variety of secondary sources of information, where it will enhance learning as well as gaining first hand experiences. We recognise the fact that we have children of differing scientific ability in all our classes and so we provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child.
We achieve this in a variety of way by:
- Using a mastery approach to learning
- Setting tasks of increasing difficulty (we do not expect all children to complete all tasks)
- Setting common tasks that are open-ended and can have a variety of responses
- Scaffolding learning as needed
- Reviewing previous learning and focusing on sticky learning
- Providing a range of challenges with different resources
- Using additional adults to support the work of individual children or small groups
- Incorporating high order questions that apply to scientific thinking to extend the most able children in science
Impact
At the end of each year we expect the children to have achieved Age Related Expectations (ARE) for their year group. Some children will have progressed further and achieved greater depth (GD)
Children’s achievement in Science is assessed through:
- Formative assessment during Science lessons.
- Termly summative assessments.
- Book scrutiny.
- Learning walks and professional dialogue with teachers.
- Talking to pupils about their learning (pupil voice)
- Teacher discussions with the Science Lead