DT

Intent: What we are trying to achieve with our D&T Curriculum

We strive to ensure that our Design and Technology curriculum aims to develop pupils' expertise by fostering deep substantive knowledge (the 'what'), robust disciplinary knowledge (the 'how'), and strong conceptual understanding (the 'why'). We achieve this by embedding the principles of the National Curriculum and aligning with current Ofsted guidance, ensuring pupils can confidently apply their skills and knowledge to design, make, and evaluate high-quality products. Design and Technology ensures that by using creativity and imagination, pupils design and make products that solve real and relevant problems within a variety of contexts, considering their own and others’ needs, wants and values. Through a progressive curriculum, the children learn a variety of different skills and this enables a practical and critical understanding of their own and others’ work that gives a broader understanding of the world linking creativity and practical skills at its best. At Theydon Bois Primary School, we have designed our Design and Technology curriculum with the intent that children design purposeful, functional and appealing products for themselves and other users based on design criteria and using their learned skills: generate, develop, model and communicate their ideas through talking, drawing, templates, mock-ups and computing.

Knowledge Organisers

Theydon Bois Primary has created its own Knowledge Organisers to support with memory skills, in order to retain key facts and support with learning. There is lots of educational research into memory, indicating that our working memory capacity is limited (cognitive load theory), so by storing more in our long-term memory, we can free up our working memory capacity (Paas et al, 2004), which will support our day to day learning.

We created these Knowledge Organisers to aid the retention of key knowledge, vocabulary and skills taught within topics; to encourage that pupils then actively use this knowledge, vocabulary and these skills wherever possible. Our goal is that these Knowledge Organisers will be introduced at the start of each topic within our half termly themes. They provide key information that we expect all children to be able to discuss and expand upon by the end of the topic.

They provide parents with an insight into what our pupils will be learning over the half term. The individual Knowledge Organisers will also be used regularly within lessons and recapped at the end of the topic or theme, highlighting to the pupils how much they have learnt.

The Knowledge Organisers also provide a starting point for parents who wish to challenge their children further. We actively encourage parents to investigate and research the topic in greater depth or to reinforce at home, what the pupils are doing in the classroom. Our Knowledge Organisers have been created for most topics we cover within a curriculum subject. They will be added to as we go through the year. They will be actively used in lessons and referred to regularly, reinforcing key vocabulary throughout the topic.