Curriculum Enrichment at Lawn

Our curriculum extends beyond the National Curriculum and includes a wide range of enriching experiences and opportunities both within and beyond the school day.  In addition to our exciting and stimulating curriculum, we also provide further opportunities to enhance children's learning wherever possible.  These include:

• Educational visits and residentials
• After school and lunchtime clubs
• Visitors
• Workshops
• Themed days and weeks
• Forest school and outdoor learning
• Home Learning

Whole School Theme Day/Weeks

Throughout the year, themed days/weeks are woven into the curriculum to extend the breadth and balance of opportunities we offer our children and to help to immerse them into an experience.  These include, Anti-bullying week, Creative Arts Week, World Book Day, Sports and Health Week, Mini Enterprise Week, Science Day, Cultural Day, WWII Week, Community Day, RE Days and others.  This year we have had a Victorian Christmas Week and are planning a science day in term 6.

Working with the community

Each year we try to do at least one community project, where our children get the opportunity to work or celebrate alongside people from our local community.  This year to celebrate VE Day we invited the residents from Huggins College into the school for afternoon tea.  All classes learnt a WWII song and performed it to the residents.  Children volunteered to serve the tea for the afternoon.

Forest School & Outdoor Learning

Forest Schools is a Scandinavian initiative designed to encourage and inspire individuals of any age through an innovative, long-term, educational approach to outdoor play and learning in a woodland environment.  We currently have two teachers training to deliver the Forest Schools programme.

Forest schools is offered to our EYFS and Year 1 children, but we intend to role this out to the other year groups in due course.  Currently we offer Forest Schools to Y2-Y6 as an after-school club.  Sessions are designed around the needs of the group to ensure that they are learner-led.  Sessions are designed around a theme, themes are sometimes subtle such as evolving or exploring the site or more obvious such as butterflies, spies, fairies or nature investigators.  Many areas of the National Curriculum are intrinsically covered, in the Forest Schools experience without the programmes needing to be curriculum led.  Teamwork skills are developed through games and activities.  Individual skills and self-esteem are heightened throughout activities such as hide and seek, shelter building, tool skills, lighting fires or environmental art, the list is endless.  Each activity develops intra and inter-personal skills as well as practical and intellectual skills.

We are an Eco-school and value the benefits of outdoor learning.  Children are stimulated by the outdoors where they can undertake a range of practical activities to support and enhance learning across the curriculum.  Our Each class also benefit from tending their own growing beds to produce fruit and vegetables to use in cooking activities.

Further up the school, opportunities are built into the curriculum for children to continue learning beyond the classroom including undertaking fieldwork and enquiry based work in the local area.

Lunchtimes & Outdoor Learning

Play has long been a vastly underutilised educational resource and only recently has it really begun to shine.  We have incorporated outdoor learning into lunchtimes by zoning our playground and field.  We now have art, reading, music, science, character education with our Junior Joes, games for strategy, drama, history with our archaeological dig site, writing, sport, play including our sandpit and imaginative play.  We are continuing to develop this.

Our commitment to this outdoor learning ensures we are able to offer the children the opportunity to explore the world around them but also engage in some fairly lofty subjects.

Educational Visits and Residentials

In our experience trips and residentials are an essential part of the children's all-round education.

Increasing independence and confidence

At Lawn, we introduce annual residential trips in Year 3, with the time the children spend away from home gradually increasing from one night in year 3 to three nights in Year 6.  The locations and focus vary from year to year to ensure we provide a range of experiences for the children.  The school has its own camping equipment which we purchased last year, including a mess tent.

For some of our children, these overnight trips are their first real taste of independence.  Experiencing this independence in a safe and positive environment boosts the children's self-confidence.  Residentials are essential for personal and social development, allowing new friendships to bloom and new challenges to be faced.

Teachers also plan a range of day trips and workshops to enhance children's learning experiences.

Out of our comfort zone

Experiences that take children out of their comfort zone are essential for personal growth and developing an appetite for trying new things.  Day trips and residentials enable our children to enjoy experiences that cannot be replicated in the classroom environment.  Dressing up as a knight at Bodium Castle, casting a spell at Harry Potter Studios or swinging through the trees at Go Ape and let's not forget the magnificence of the Victoria & Albert Museum, they simply have to be experienced.

Contribute to the Wider World Experience

With each trip, children venture into undiscovered territory and as their life experience grows, so does their perspective of the world we live in.

Great way to learn and remember information

School trips transport children's learning to a new and exciting location.  Trips are always memorable and therefore make effective learning tools.  It brings the children's learning alive and relevant.  As a result their learning becomes embedded.

Classroom learning feels new and exciting

A well chosen trip has the power to breathe life into a study theme. Activities and interactive tasks add an element of excitement to learning, which are especially effective in engaging visual or hands-on learners.  Trips support and enhance the curriculum, whilst providing new perspectives and wider context for children to think about

Visitors into school

Visitors have a valuable role to play and can contribute to many aspects of the life and work of the school.  They deliver talks, workshops and full day activities across a wide range of subjects, giving children access to outside experiences and expertise.  Visitors provide a link with the wider community - children have the opportunity to work alongside artists, musicians, authors, health professions and others.

Termly STEAM presentations introduce children to the world of work, develop career-related learning and breakdown gender stereotypes.  Presentations introduce children to different career options and aim to increase aspirations while also raising self-esteem and breaking down barriers.  Talks are wide ranging reflecting different employment sectors and delivered by both men and women.

After-school Clubs

After School Clubs are a great way to enrich a child's day by helping them to learn new skills whilst having fun with their school friends.  They can really help provide direction, create a new social network, and aid academic success.

Over the course of the year, we aim to provide a wide range of after school clubs to excite and enrich the children's learning.  See below for a copy of this years overview.

• Clubs start straight after school and finish at 4:15pm
• Children need to be collected from the front entrance
• There are some fees attached to clubs for supplies

PE & Sport

At Lawn Primary we are using our PE & Sports Premium to improve the provision and resources we have in school.  Teachers have regular training sessions with our Sports Partnership.  We have had a coach in to teach dance.

This year we reviewed our swimming provision and decided that we needed a much more intense offer.  We now offer a term of 1 hour lessons to the whole of KS2.  Our staff are also undergoing training to be swimming instructors and life guards so that we can have more control over the content of lessons and reduce ongoing costs.  This year we have used the sports premium to fund the swimming offer and train our staff.

During the summer term we hold a week of sport which culminates in sports day.  Every 4 years to coincide with the Olympic Games we hold a much bigger two week sporting event.

Virtual Reality (VR)

At Lawn Primary we have invested in a class set of VR. This offers immersive learning experiences that can enhance engagement, retention and understanding across various subjects.  It can be particularly effective for subjects such as history, geography and science where visualizing concepts like the Roman Empire, different continents, or the human body can be incredibly valuable.

Music, Art & Drama

Lawn Primary School provides opportunities for children to take part in a wide range of musical activities and performances where they are encouraged to sing, compose and work creatively with sound.  Through active listening, children's awareness, understanding and appreciation of a wide variety of music are developed.  A range of opportunities are provided within and beyond the curriculum for children to showcase their musical skills and talents, for example every two years our choir take part in Young Voices where school choirs across the South East of England come together to perform at the 02 Arena in London.  Visits to the theatre further enriches children's cultural development.

Art is developed throughout the school with the use of art portfolios, which move with the children through the school.  We run an art competition at the beginning of every year and the winners from each class get their work framed and displayed in our entrance corridor.  

As a school we appreciate and understand the importance of drama within our curriculum.  Research reveals that drama has a positive impact on children's physical, emotional, social and cognitive development.  Drama is developed across the school in a variety of ways, including story-telling.

Opportunities to Volunteer

Volunteering is an activity that everyone can get involved in and benefit from.  At Lawn Primary we promote and encourage children's active citizenship and positive contribution to the school and wider community.  We offer lots of opportunities for children to take on new responsibilities and be involved in successfully supporting the life and work of the school.  These include elected representatives on our School Council, Eco Warriors, and Junior Joes.  Older children can also volunteer within classes to take on various responsibilities ranging from lunch duties, to collecting and distributing registers, to helping with the organisation of equipment in assemblies.

Assemblies

A rounded programme of assemblies helps to promote children's spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, and provide clear guidance on what is right and what is wrong.  Assemblies also celebrate the religious festivals from all faiths that happen throughout the year.  We also have Harvest Celebration, Easter Celebration and Christmas Celebration at St Botolph's Church.  We hold celebration assemblies once a week and The Family Trust, a local children's Christian Charity, run an enthusiastic assembly each term.  Once a term, specialist STEAM assemblies are held to inspire children and raise their aspirations about potential careers for the future.

Homework

The Doodle apps mimic the actions of a good tutor, it works with your child to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Doodle then works its magic to build them a personalised learning programme tailored to their needs. It creates an immersive, interactive learning experience for your child, who is simply guided through the programme to the areas they need to work on. Doodle automatically targets tricky topics, fills learning gaps and consolidates knowledge.