Curriculum Areas

Our five identified curriculum areas

We use a range of recourses to support our implementation such as Jigsaw PSHE and Discover RE. We also use the Early Years Foundation Stage profile and the National Curriculum as a guide to shape our curriculum.

We take an explicit active approach to develop our children as thinkers. Each lesson begins with the retrieval task, which provides opportunity for children to retrieve prior knowledge. The frame for the lesson is set through the learning intention, which helps the students understand what the purpose of the lesson is and what success will look like.

To develop our children’s vocabulary, our curriculum is enriched by literature. Children use poetry, picture books, film and short clips, powerful images and music to draw predictions and inferences through the power of literature, both modern and historical. Children use Thinkers Keys and Thinking hats to draw conclusions about the world around them. The exploration, modelling and teaching of vocabulary is explicit and mapped in a systematic age-appropriate way. We speak in full sentences and we expect children to speak in full sentences also, therefore developing oracy skills.

We teach the children all 16 Habits of Mind. However, for the children at New Horizons Children’s Academy we have a particular focus on what makes us be our best selves through our being our best agenda. 

We have a planned enrichment curriculum to provide our children with opportunities within their locality and beyond. This, as well as our after-school provision, provides the children with a deeper understanding of the world around them. They use these experiences to build their cultural capital.