Orchid Vale Primary School

At Orchid Vale, our curriculum is designed with these key aims :

• To enable our pupils to leave our school as effective and confident communicators
• To provide our pupils with the experiences , skills and knowledge that ensure that the doors of future learning experiences are open and available to them.
• To ensure that the learning process promotes questioning, challenge and self-motivation.

Oracy is held at the centre of our children’s learning.  We encourage focused communication throughout all areas of the curriculum.  Children are taught to express knowledge, opinions, questions, reasoning  and processes effectively and articulately.

Throughout Reception and Year 1, children continue to follow Little Wandle Phonics in order to build a structured and sound knowledge of the sounds required to read and spell confidently in the English language.

Children are read to from a wide range of titles every day.  It is a priority for us, as a school community, that our children leave us with a love of books and reading.  If we can inspire a love of reading in them at this important age, we believe that it will stay with them throughout their lifelong learning journey.

Maths, at Orchid Vale, is taught through a programme called CanDo maths.  It supports the development of mathematical ability in small manageable steps that develop a deep understanding of mathematical concepts.  Mathematical reasoning is at the heart of their learning and children are taught how to articulate their understanding both in spoken and written forms.  Key skills are revisited on a daily basis to ensure that they have been retained.

Science is taught through a spiral curriculum which builds knowledge and practical skills through revisiting aspects of science at increasingly challenging levels.  From an early age, children are taught the different content from biology, chemistry and physics and how they relate to each other.

Other curriculum areas are taught through longer projects.  These are designed to enable the children to learn key knowledge whilst practising skills that develop our pupils as confident learners and prepare them with the foundations that they would need to pursue any subject to the very highest level should they choose to.

When your child enters Orchid Vale, we take our responsibility for their learning seriously.  We recognise that there is so much more to learning than academic subjects and, for that reason, we design our curriculum around the whole child and the place that they are going to hold in society as a successful, confident and compassionate adult.  Through our school values of respect, individuality, responsibility, perseverence, kindness and honesty, we teach our children to approach challenges proactively and positively.

Enrichment of the curriculum brings learning alive and makes experiences memorable. 

Your child’s journey through Orchid Vale should be a memorable one!