Foxhill Primary School

 Intent 

At Foxhill Primary School, we are SCIENTISTS!

We want children to love Science and view the sky as the limit. It is our aim for scientists, both past and present, to inspire our children to be the next astronaut, forensic scientist, toxicologist or microbiologist. Our intent is to give every child a broad and balanced Science curriculum which enables them to confidently explore and discover what is around them, so that they have a deeper understanding of the world we live in. To achieve this, it involves exciting, practical hands on experiences that encourage curiosity and questioning. Our aim is that these stimulating and challenging experiences help every child secure and extend their scientific knowledge and vocabulary, as well as promoting a love and thirst for learning. We want our children to remember their science lessons in our school, to cherish these memories and embrace the scientific opportunities they are presented with!

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Implementation

At Foxhill, we adopted the CUSP Science Curriculum in September 2023. Through this pupils become more expert as they progress through the curriculum, accumulating, connecting and making sense of the rich substantive and disciplinary knowledge.

 

•  Substantive knowledge -  this is the subject knowledge and explicit vocabulary used to learn about the content. In CUSP science, an extensive knowledge base is constructed so that pupils have a solid foundation to build on. Misconceptions within Science are quite common and have to be challenged although this is not done until the children have built up the knowledge in order to understand it fully.

• Disciplinary knowledge – this is knowing how to collect, use, interpret, understand and evaluate the evidence from scientific processes. 

• Scientific analysis is developed through IPROF criteria (see below). We call it ‘Thinking Scientifically

1. identifying and classifying

2. pattern seeking

3. research

4. observing over time

5. fair and comparative testing