The science curriculum at Monkston is designed to engage our pupils and promote an interest in all areas of science: physics, biology and chemistry. At Monkston we want to nurture a love of learning and build resilience and resourcefulness ensuring all pupils achieve and succeed. Through carefully planned lessons, we create a sense of excitement and curiosity for the subject. We develop pupils’ scientific knowledge, conceptual understanding, and ability to work scientifically, think clearly and speak confidently about science.

The snap science teaching program gives a clearly sequenced and progressive programme for both knowledge and scientific enquiry, ensuring pupils build on prior knowledge therefore deepening their understanding. Through scientific enquiry pupils in all year groups develop approaches to enquiry, questioning, plan creative and resourceful investigations and reflect on their results and predictions. Throughout each year group, scientific enquiry is taught with increasing challenge to ensure progression from EYFS to year 6 in the following areas:

• • Observing over time –observing or measuring how one variable changes over time.
  • Identifying and classifying –identifying and naming materials and living things and make observations or carry out tests to organise them into groups.
  • Looking for patterns –making observations or carry out surveys of variables that cannot be easily controlled and look for relationships between two sets of data.
  • Comparative and fair testing –observing or measure the effect of changing one variable when controlling others as far as possible.
  • Answering questions using secondary sources of evidence –answering questions using data or information that they have not collected first hand.

Knowledge and skills are developed and built on throughout year groups. For example learning about a variety of familiar and less familiar animals, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals in year 1 is built upon in year 2 where children learn about the basic needs of animals. This is further built on in years 3 and 5 where children learn about plant and animal life cycles, compare life cycles and think about endangered species.

Pupils carry out research into scientists past and present to see how they have contributed to the scientific world. They consider how science has been shaped and the uses of science now and in the future. This builds an awareness of the value and importance of other cultures in the past and

present.

Throughout the science curriculum, pupils’ understanding of British values and global issues are capitalised on. Values are explicitly linked to specific topics such as recycling in year 5, our impact on the planet in year 3 and how we can help the environment by conserving energy in year 4. This teaches children how we can look after our environment and the environmental changes taking place if we do not. In addition, whole school projects reinforce this learning. For example, during ‘Plastic Week’ pupils created a ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ display as part of a community project with the local church.

Throughout the science curriculum, the different characteristics of learning are explored to deepen the children’s understanding of being inquisitive, resilient, cooperative, creative, resourceful and reflective. We encourage pupils to become inquisitive when growing seeds in year 2 and build on this in year 3 when learning about the absorption and transport of water and nutrients and the role of the leaf in making food for the plant. Through scientific enquiry, children learn how to work cooperatively and be resourceful when planning experiments. Children are encouraged to develop their understanding of how they learn and what can help them.