Science

Intent

Science at St Thomas’ provides experiential and engaging learning with an exciting chance for pupils to learn about the wider world. To ensure high quality science education throughout the school, we provide our children with the essential aspects of the knowledge, methods, processes, and uses of science. We develop children’s ideas and ways of working that enable them to make sense of the world in which they live through investigation, as well as using and applying process skills. Through building up a body of key foundational knowledge, concepts and scientific vocabulary, pupils are encouraged to recognise the power of rational explanation. St Thomas’ wants children to understand how science can be used to explain what is occurring, predict how things will behave, and analyse causes.

Implementation

In ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in science, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school from EYFS to the end of KS2. Careful planning allows us to teach science across a two-year cycle ensuring the children can delve deep into their topics. Science teaching at St Thomas’ involves adapting and extending the curriculum to match all pupils’ needs. Whilst challenge is built into every lesson for the more able, support is in place for those children with additional needs. We use adaptive teaching which includes explicit instruction, cognitive and metacognitive strategies, scaffolding, flexible grouping as well as the children using our most up to date technology on their own iPad’s. Our science investigations and experiments help to implement the skills of observing, measuring, predicting, hypothesising, experimenting, interpreting, evaluating, and developing the use of scientific language.

Impact

The impact of science education within our school is to ensure children not only acquire the science capital and appropriate age-related knowledge linked to the science curriculum but also to be able to use their scientific skills to investigate the concepts they have learned. To measure the impact of teaching and learning, we have an assessment system in place that informs teacher assessment at regular intervals in the school year. We use mind maps at the beginning and the end of topics to assess children’s learning and progress which are uploaded to ‘Seesaw’ for monitoring. To evaluate and review the impact of science learning through school, we take part in learning walks, pupil voice sessions, dedicated staff meetings, workshares, and observations.