Our Vision for Science

At Christ Church Primary School, we pride ourselves on the high-quality science provision we provide for all pupils enabling them to develop an enthusiasm and enjoyment of scientific learning. Science provides the foundations for understanding the world through the specific disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics. It is our aim that children build up a body of key foundational knowledge and concepts as they are encouraged to recognise the power of rational explanation, develop a sense of excitement and curiosity about natural phenomena.

Our Science Curriculum

Our curriculum recognises the importance of working scientifically and pupils experience, observe, explore, test, develop ideas and make connections as they look closely at the natural and humanly constructed world around them. Our curriculum follows the National Curriculum program of study for science to provide children with:

• A wide range of opportunities to develop curiosity, ask questions and develop a broad scientific vocabulary to help explain what they observe and find out.
• The skills to work scientifically and to have opportunities for them to be applied.
• Opportunities for scientific discussions, challenging their own and others' thinking.
• Chances to describe and evaluate their own and others’ scientific ideas using evidence from a range of sources.
• Time to ask their own questions about the scientific phenomena that they are studying and select the most appropriate ways to answer these questions.
• Opportunities to use a range of scientific equipment - to take accurate and precise measurements or readings, with repeat readings where appropriate.
• Skills to record data and results using scientific diagrams and labels, classification keys, tables, scatter graphs, bar and line graphs.
• The ability to draw conclusions, explain and evaluate their methods and findings, communicating these in a variety of ways.
• Chance to raise further questions that could be investigated, based on their data and observations.

Key Information

• We have a wide range of scientific resources and equipment to enable the children to investigate and question the world around us practically.
• Throughout school, quality science lessons are taught weekly.
• We offer extra-curricular opportunities after school where children can develop and explore their scientific ideas for example, gardening club.
• We run 'Happy Healthy Lunchtimes' and ‘Healthy Lunchbox Weeks’ where we promote healthy eating and the importance of balanced diets to look after our bodies.
• We access Forest School within our Multi Academy Trust schools to further enhance our science curriculum.
• Our Eco School status shows our Eco-Committee are strong advocates for looking after our environment and promoting change in our community, taking part in projects such as ‘The Great Big School Clean’ and ‘The Bulb Project’.
• Children learn about significant figures through science and our wider curriculum for example, studying David Attenborough in English.

Developing Literacy through Science 

We develop literacy through all areas of our curriculum, including science, in the following ways: 

• using an extensive range of scientific vocabulary in lessons to extend children's language 
• encouraging high quality oracy for example, through discussion, investigations, questioning and presenting findings
• reading non-fiction scientific texts such as articles, diagrams or instructions for experiments, which includes subject specific vocabulary
• writing scientifically to record predictions, experiment results, conclusions or when answering questions.

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