Our Curriculum
We are very proud of our school curriculum, which has been designed by the teachers at Torrisholme, with help from our children and their families, especially for the children of Torrisholme. Our curriculum is built to support the children's development of skills and attributes that they need to be successful in learning and in life.
Our school curriculum centres around exciting topics, through which the children’s learning is planned. Each topic involves a number of subject areas from the National Curriculum, which link to the topic. Each topic also includes a number of ‘experiences’ which are planned to enrich the curriculum and extend learning.
Subject areas which don’t fit within a topic are taught discretely, sometimes alongside a topic and sometimes in a ‘block’, for example a Science Week.
The National Curriculum, which forms part of our school curriculum, is used to plan learning. Children cover the National Curriculum in:
English
Maths
Science
Geography
History
Art & Design
Computing
Design & Technology
Physical Education
Music
Languages
Children are also taught Religious Education, which follows the Lancashire Agreed Syllabus and PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education).
Further details of each classes’ curriculum can be found in the overviews below.
If you would like to find out more about the curriculum at Torrisholme, please speak to a member of staff.
Spanish
We are lucky enough to have a specialist Spanish teacher, Senora Pitcher, who teaches every class throughout school each week. The children enjoy learning Spanish through lots of exciting, interactive activities such as songs and role play, which are often linked to their class topic.
See the ‘Spanish’ page in the ‘Class Pages’ section of the website to find out more about what each class is learning in Spanish.
Key Skills and Attributes
The following list of key skills and attributes was compiled by the staff and families at Torrisholme. Our curriculum is planned to develop these skills and attributes throughout the school, promoting the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils and building an understanding of fundamental British values.
Skills
Attributes
Curriculum Overview
We are currently working on redeveloping our curriculum. Coming soon - watch this space!
Curriculum Drivers
Our brand new curriculum will be underpinned by three curriculum 'drivers.'
Looking after ourselves
Looking after each other
Looking after our world
Phonics and Reading
At Torrisholme, we believe that reading is probably the most important skill for life that we teach our children. Success in learning to read is crucial to success in other areas of the school curriculum.
In Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, all the children have daily phonics sessions which help them with their reading, writing and spelling. Teachers plan these sessions following the 'Letters and Sounds' framework. In addition to these sessions, targeted intervention sessions are run in phonics, to help some children develop these skills.
All children will have a reading book, which is chosen for them from a large bank of reading books, which is matched to the stage of their reading and phonic development. These books come from a range reading schemes, including Collins Big Cat, Floppy’s Phonics and Pearson Phonic Bugs. These books are fully decodable and can be read independently by your child and with letter sounds they have been taught in school. Later on in school, children move on to reading books from a selection of ‘Colour Book Bands’ that are designed to progress and challenge their reading and comprehension ability. When children are considered a 'Free Reader', their reading fluency and understanding is such that they are able to select and tackle age-appropriate and suitable books for themselves. At each stage of children's reading development, their book level is carefully matched to support and develop both their reading fluency alongside their comprehension.
Throughout school, we expect that children read regularly at home, to practise their reading skills. We also run workshops for parents, to help them to support their children as they learn to read. Please encourage your child to read their books independently and then to re-read for fluency and understanding.
In class, children also take part in regular 'guided reading' sessions, where they work on developing reading and comprehension skills such as inference and deduction. In EYFS and Year 1, this happens in small phonic phase groups, using texts that closely match the children's phonic ability. From Year 2 onwards, we adopt a whole class guided reading approach where we use a range of texts across different genres to develop our comprehension skills.
All of us at Torrisholme have a desire to encourage a genuine love of reading. Therefore, all classes have regular story sessions where novels, poems and non-fiction texts are shared for pleasure and enjoyment.