Here at Cumnor, we enjoy our Science very much. We highly value a passion for scientific learning, alongside the creativity to ask questions, challenge ideas and explore and investigate, describe, reason and explain. We want these abilities to remain beyond life at Cumnor School, leading to inventors, creators, investigators and scientists.
We start by exploring the world around us and asking questions in the Foundation Stage as part of our “Knowledge and understanding of the world” strand of the Foundation Stage curriculum.
From Year 1 to Year 6 we follow the National Curriculum studying all the areas of science: life and living processes, materials and physical processes. This includes everything from knowing what a seed needs in order to germinate right up to making healthy life choices or understanding the forces involved when a car grips the road.
We need to learn how to carry out experiments too and we believe that science skills are the most fun to learn and we have a very hands-on style of teaching. Science lessons take place every week in every class and are mostly active and practical, lasting at least an hour. They often include aspects of maths and English so we can practise our core skills in a real context, presenting our results in graphs and reports.
At Cumnor School, we have a specialist science teacher, Jules Pottle. Mrs Pottle has developed and refined her teaching of science over many years, and does a fabulous job of combining the key scientific skills and concepts that primary children need to understand in an exciting and motivating way. Mrs Pottle works closely with both the Key Stage 1 and the Key Stage 2 teams to ensure that science is strength across the school. Mrs Pottle has been awarded the Primary Science Teacher of the Year award and has written many articles on science teaching. She is now in the process of writing her fifth book to be published later this year. We also are incredibly lucky to have the scientific knowledge and expertise of our Oxford based community on our doorstep. Many parents and community
members share their expertise with us through visits and talks to enrich our Science curriculum.
For our long term Science progression plans see here: