Science

At Bannerman Road Community Academy, our vision is to provide a science curriculum which excites and inspires children by the familiar and allows them to explore as they are curious about the unknown world around them, therefore helping them to develop a deeper understanding of their local community and the wider world. We aim to do this by giving our children exciting, practical hands-on experiences where they can enjoy and develop their scientific skills of investigating, communicating and questioning in a range of contexts. Through these hands-on experiences children are able to show and enhance their wonderful natural curiosity and desire to learn new things, which helps them become lifelong learners. We actively strive to broaden our children’s hands-on experiences, throughout the school, by arranging engaging trips to go on, having inspiring visitors come into our school, along with holding an annual science week.

We value our children’s inquisitiveness and encourage them to always ask questions and seek to find the answers, while immersing them in scientific language developing their vocabulary and communicating their scientific understanding in different ways. The key knowledge we teach is challenging and we aim to develop our pupils’ resilience with their learning by enabling them to practise through carefully planned retrieval activities – Sticky Knowledge - to ensure knowledge is stored and activated in the long-term memory. This knowledge is also developed upon each year through our carefully sequenced curriculum.

In EYFS, our youngest pupils begin to explore the world around them, with a focus on being proud of their local environment, through the key area ‘Understanding the World’. Pupils start to develop scientific skills through exploration, observation and questioning, where they are exploring people, simple animals, plants and life cycles.

Throughout Key Stage 1 and 2, pupils further expand upon this strong scientific foundation. Science units are organised into the scientific domains: Biology, Physics and Chemistry, we introduce these domains from KS2. Within these domains, the substantive component knowledge that pupils will learn is carefully sequenced to allow them to understand broader scientific concepts. Knowledge organisers are used to provide an overview of key knowledge and vocabulary for each unit, as well to activate prior knowledge.

We believe that by providing our children with an engaging, sequenced science curriculum with a range of experiences and opportunities, we are ensuring that they become curious, confident lifelong learners and helping to prepare them for the ever-changing world around them and to think on a global scale.

Our aim is for when our children leave at the end of KS2 they should:

• Have an enjoyment and passion for science helping them to understand what it means to be a scientist.
• Have an understanding of the key domains of knowledge and be able to make links between them.
• Have an understanding of how to work scientifically and carry out investigations, including knowing the different key components to an investigation and the skills a scientist uses.