Our Curriculum
The intention of our curriculum is to create a culture of enquiry, curiosity and challenge that permeates everything we do.
The Filton Avenue vision is to provide all our young people with the knowledge and skills that they will need to thrive, not just in their local community but in the wider world as it really is, not as it once was.
Working in partnership with our families, we will help them to be happy, confident, resilient, independent and motivated; to use our shared values to make informed choices; to develop a life-long love of learning; to achieve highly and to the best of their ability; to feel valued.
We want to help them to ask great questions and think critically; teach them how to make things; how to speak confidently and listen actively; how to be aspirational and self-organising; how to be enquiring and curious and to discover things for themselves; how to protect their own (physical and mental) health and care for others; how to build positive relationships and contribute to their community; to value nature and care for the environment; how to engage actively and creatively; to set them up to live successfully.
To do all this, we will provide a safe, secure and aspirational learning environment and the opportunity to participate in a range of stimulating experiences.
Enquiry
What is enquiry-based learning at Filton Avenue Primary School?
Our enquiry curriculum enables our learners to become curious about the world around them. We teach the National Curriculum through content that is centred around Bristol, using the Curious City Framework by Lighting Up Learning as a starting point. Our approach ensures everything we do is relevant, purposeful and builds learners understanding of local places and local stories, which provides learners with a valuable context for their learning.
Enquiry-led learning provokes learners with key questions too big to answer in one go, but not so conceptually large that they cannot understand them. Learners are then guided through a scaffolded process, where they engage in the content, practice skills, learn key knowledge and finally challenge themselves to answer the big question with a piece of writing, performance or animation. Each enquiry can last between one and six weeks and ensures that, over the year, the curriculum is covered.
Some examples of our Enquiry questions:
Year 1: What grows in my city?
Year 2: How are artists inspired by nature?
Year 3: Why did people travel in the past?
Year 4: What is underneath our feet?
Year 5: How can science help the homeless?
Year 6: How are adaption and evolution linked?
Another key aspect of our curriculum is that children don’t “do” a subject, such as Geography, but they practise “being” Geographers.
We embed Oracy through our whole curriculum, teaching children how to use both presentational and exploratory talk effectively. These skills are taught across the whole curriculum, through the use of sentence stems, discussion roles and various other opportunities. We also hold competitions throughout the year, and we invite families in for class assemblies, performances and exhibitions of learning, which give the children many opportunities to practise their Oracy skills.
We believe in the development of the individual and are focused on ensuring that children leave with not only an understanding of academic subjects, but also with a strong set of life skills. One aspect of these ‘life skills’ that we develop is the importance of an active and healthy lifestyle. Throughout the curriculum, we ensure that we cover not only the theory but provide children with lots of practical experience and a love of physical activities too.
There are also school day trips to places such as Bristol Zoo, the SS Great Britain and our Summer camp for Year 6 pupils. Each class will be notified about these during the school year.
In addition to physical education and personal, social and health education lessons we provide a range of sporting activities and clubs throughout the school year that extend the school day and further promote an active and healthy lifestyle. Popular clubs include the football, netball and gardening clubs. We will write to you when clubs are available for each year group.
We also have music lessons provided by the Bristol Music Service, who provide many of the musical instruments. We will let you know when lessons start and what they cost in advance.
How our curriculum is organised:
