The Howard Primary School Curriculum Committee meets once a week to discuss their opinions and those of their classmates on our curriculum.  Representatives have been elected by each class from Year 2 – Year 6.  Each week, a different Subject Leader attends to interview and gain feedback on the teaching and learning of their subject across the school.  As well as discussing understanding of vocabulary and recollection of key knowledge, types of questions asked include:

 

• Why is it important to learn this subject?
• How do you know how well you are doing in this subject?
• What does your teacher do to help you if you are stuck?
• What kinds of challenges are you given in this subject?
• What are you learning at the moment in this subject?
• Is there anything you’d like us to do differently / learn more about in this subject?
• What connections can you make with this subject / unit and others you have learnt about?
• What do you like / dislike about this subject?

The information shared and gained in these meetings is used to inform future actions, curriculum mapping and professional development and to improve our broad and balanced curriculum on an ongoing basis.

 

Some examples of pupil feedback:

Why do you think it’s important for us to have a Curriculum Committee?

 

If one of our classmates wants to include something in one of the subjects, we can tell the curriculum leader of that subject.

 

We can be a support - if some people don’t like a subject much we can suggest ways to change it so they like it.

 

If your class wants to include something in the lessons or they want to rate what we are doing in a lesson they can tell the committee and then they can tell the subject leader.

What is the impact of us blocking your foundation subjects this year?  What do you like / dislike about it?

I like blocking because we get to do that subject every afternoon.  That helps me learn better.

 

I like it because with the subject we are blocking, we can cover everything we do in the subject.  On one day we sometimes don’t finish but if we do it the whole week we get to finish the work and do everything we planned.

 

I like blocking because if we do RE one day and then history another, it gets confusing with the learning.  If it’s your favourite subject then when the block is ended you feel like you want more!  We get more interesting learning.

 

We learn more when blocking because we cover more of the subject and we engage more in the lesson.  We might have less time to engage in the lesson otherwise.

How do you think your teacher promotes reading in your classroom?

You describe reading to us and you really encourage us to read but you don’t force us to read.  You encourage us to read because it’s a good thing and it teaches us a lot.

 

You promote reading by having loads of different types of books ready to read.  

 

My teacher encourages us to read by sharing books that he has read, like Room 13, he had read this book and he told us to read it and it was a really good book

 

What does working scientifically mean to you?

We feel like scientists and we know what we are doing!

 

When we do experiments, to make things fair and you know what you are doing and know what you need to use.  

 

When you do an experiment you make sure it's a fair test and you try the experiment a couple of times and compare the answers. 

Do you feel like you use scientific language within your science lessons?

How do you go about using this language in your everyday science lessons?

We usually refer to the concept words on our science working board.  

 

We have the vocabulary words and we say them and we know the meaning and our teacher sometimes tries to push us to use the words when we are writing or doing the experiment.

How does your teacher give you feedback about how well you’re doing in PE?

We get dojo points!

 

Sometimes in football, we all line up and the captain and the co-captain choose a person of the match and the rest of the people say you have tried your hardest.

 

At the end, we all sit down and Ms tells us what we did well and what we could do better.

 

Ms tells us good job during the lesson but also tells us what to improve on.

 

Miss gives us feedback at the end.  

 

If the teacher notices you are struggling a bit, he will stop and tell you an easier way to do it.