Science

 ‘A high-quality science education provides the foundations for understanding the world through the specific disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics.’ 

(National Curriculum, 2014)

INTENT

At Dogmersfield Primary School, we encourage our students to have a natural curiosity in the world. We aim for them to become enquiry-based learners and to embrace their sense of curiosity about natural events. Our school's science curriculum focuses on helping children form concepts and ways of working that will help them understand the world they live in. The children will learn and develop the key ideas in each lesson as well as how to apply scientific knowledge. We make sure that the Working Scientifically skills are reinforced and developed over the course of a child's time in school so that they can use their scientific knowledge when using tools, conducting experiments and investigations, putting forth arguments and confidently elucidating concepts, being familiar with scientific terminology, and, most importantly, to continue to ask questions and be curious of their surroundings.

IMPLEMENTATION

Pupils are taught Science lessons of around an hour and a half each week. These lessons may be broken into parts depending on the age and needs of the pupils. Our Science curriculum is based on the Hampshire model of what should be learned in Science.   Hampshire have taken the National Curriculum and have identified the ‘key ideas’ that should be taught as a scientific concept.  These ‘key ideas’ have in turn been carefully designed to fit the appropriate year group to allow knowledge to be built upon each year.

At Dogmersfield we believe science should encourage curiosity.   Investigative and practical skills, that are developed through working scientifically, should be used to develop scientific knowledge wherever possible.  Our aim is that each science lesson is 30% knowledge teaching and 70% investigating and discovering.

Within science lessons at Dogmersfield we:

Ensure children have sufficient prior basic knowledge needed to learn the new scientific key idea being taught and check they understand them before moving on to the next stage of learning.

Provide opportunities to use new ideas to tackle meaningful scientific problems to embed the knowledge taught (working scientifically).

Children will be given the opportunity within lessons to:

Raise and seek answers to their own questions.

Try to describe what happens and predict what might happen.

Try to hypothesise why things happen and why something might happen. 

Become more experienced and become better at applying a variety of types of enquiry.

Design and carry out tests and analyse evidence to find out what happens and if their ideas and explanations are sufficient.

Communicate their ideas verbally and in writing.

IMPACT

We believe that our pupils should leave Dogmersfield Primary School with:

A wider variety of skills linked to both knowledge and understanding of the key ideas, and scientific enquiry/investigative skills.

A richer vocabulary which will enable them to articulate their understanding of the key ideas.

High aspirations for children to become independent, resilient and lifelong learners.