“Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.”

Rosalind Franklin - scientist

What do we want our science curriculum to achieve?

At Woodlands, our pupils experience a high-quality, ambitious science curriculum that is both challenging and enjoyable. This provides the children with a solid foundation upon which to build their knowledge and understanding of the world around them. We aim to inspire a sense of awe and wonder, encouraging children to ask questions about their surroundings. Children will learn about topics covering all three scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry and biology), including Electricity, Light, Space, Animals (including Humans), States of Matter, Forces and Evolution and Inheritance.

Why is science important to us?

Science is all around us and we want children to recognise the importance of science in all aspects of their daily lives. We passionately believe that children should understand that science has changed all of our lives and is vital to the world’s future prosperity. By looking at how science has evolved over the years and the impact created by scientists across all fields, we aim to create inquisitive children equipped with scientific knowledge and enquiry skills necessary for their education, careers and lives beyond.

How does the curriculum structure support our aims?

Our science curriculum allows children to acquire key scientific knowledge through practical experiences. Through a wide range of purposeful, planned and structured learning opportunities, children acquire specific skills and subject knowledge to gain an understanding of the purpose and implications of chemistry, biology and physics in every aspect of their daily lives. We actively encourage children to ask questions and, over time, to select and design different types of scientific enquiry to answer them. We want our pupils to develop a secure understanding of each block of scientific knowledge. To do this, we follow a spiral curriculum, often revisiting topics over multiple years to build upon previously taught concepts (for example, Animals including humans is taught in Years 1-6, whilst Plants appear in Years 1-3 and Electricity is taught in Year 4 and Year 6).

How do we make science real and meaningful for our children?

We aim to bring science to life in our lessons, allowing children to develop their hands-on scientific enquiry skills through a range of experimentation. We make links to our local environment allowing children to learn through varied and first hand experiences about the world around them. We are very fortunate to have a range of wooded areas on our school site, as well as a pond and garden area to facilitate these experiences. We offer a variety of trips and visitors to complement and broaden the curriculum. For example, Year 1 enjoy a visit from a vet, Year 3 have an immersive day to start their topic on rocks and Year 5 participate in a practical lesson at Tonbridge Boys School.

How do we develop scientific skills?

Our science lessons are carefully sequenced to enable children to build upon their scientific knowledge as they progress. At each stage, children are immersed in rich scientific vocabulary that is taught discretely, built upon progressively and revisited regularly. The learning activities also develop the children’s working scientifically skills in line with the National Curriculum. Specifically, the children will be supported to enquire, observe, locate sources of information, plan investigations, select appropriate equipment, measure, record and analyse results as well as communicate their findings. As the children’s knowledge and understanding increases, they develop a growing ability to draw conclusions based on real evidence. Throughout our teaching, we encourage children to ‘think like a scientist’ by developing their curiosity, open-mindedness and willingness to change their ideas in light of new evidence.

How do we use assessment in science?

Assessment in science is an ongoing process, woven throughout the curriculum and used by teachers to check pupils’ understanding of key concepts. In the classroom, teachers create opportunities for assessment through class discussions and focused tasks (both practical and written). Teachers are skilled at using these observations to plan future learning. Due to the practical nature of science, experiments and discussion allow teachers to identify and correct misconceptions as they arise. This may be done by re-teaching certain elements, providing additional scaffolding or updating future planning. Using a variety of low-stakes quizzes and retrieval tasks, children revisit previously taught content helping them to commit the knowledge to their long-term memories. At the end of each unit of learning, children sit an online multiple-choice assessment, carefully structured to test their knowledge of key concepts and elicit any remaining misconceptions. Teachers use the information gathered from all these assessment opportunities to make an overall judgement as to whether each pupil is working at expected level for science or not; this is reported to parents. Our year group leads and science lead will also conduct pupil voice sessions and scrutinise pupils’ books to ascertain how well vocabulary and knowledge has been retained over time. Having triangulated monitoring, the science subject lead may decide to update planning, support teachers with planning or pedagogy, involve the inclusion team if issues pertain to pupils with SEND, review curriculum sequencing or possibly review the effectiveness of the retrieval activities or end of unit assessments.

How do we promote inclusivity and challenge in science? 

It is important that all our pupils access and learn effectively in our science lessons across the school. This involves us setting suitable learning challenges, responding to pupils’ diverse needs and overcoming potential barriers to learning and assessment for individuals and groups. Teachers utilise a range of adaptive strategies to meet the needs of our pupils, which work well in all subjects. In addition to this, we utilise further adaptations specific to science, which support pupils with SEND. For example, we use practical activities to spark the interest of children and allow them to explore these first-hand e.g. conducting experiments in the classroom and investigations in the school grounds (including the forest school and pond areas).Scientific vocabulary can be challenging and unfamiliar to many children. We use word banks and images to support children’s understanding and learning as well as pre-teaching key vocabulary. Repetition and reinforcement is an important way for us to help pupils with SEND retain key concepts in the long term and this is achieved through low-stakes quizzing and retrieval activities. In order to challenge our pupils in science, we aim to set the expectation high for all pupils and provide scaffolding for those who need it in order to access the learning. For example, observational skills (crucial for scientific investigations) are scaffolded through careful and targeted questioning. The practical nature of science will sometimes require the use of specialist equipment. The physical needs of all children (including fine motor skills) will be considered and careful, mixed ability groupings utilised to ensure participation by all.