The Curriculum at Frampton Cotterell Church of England Primary School
At FCCE, our Christian distinctiveness is evident in all aspects of school life including our curriculum design. We use the model of a tree to communicate this to the pupils.
Our tree starts with the roots. The roots are 7 Christian values, which aim to underpin all areas of our curriculum, as well as the personal, social, moral and spiritual development of all children at Frampton.
The 7 values are Love, Forgiveness, Justice, Respect, Hope, Service and Thankfulness. A story from the Bible is coupled with each value, to help the children understand what the value means and how they can develop these values within themselves and apply them to choices they make. These are:
The children are taught these stories and asked to identify how they relate to the values. Children are encouraged to spot other children demonstrating the values. Every time a child is nominated for showing a value, a leaf is added to the Roots and Fruits display board in the classroom.
As we move up the tree we have 4 apples – the fruits. These are Communication, Challenge, Successful Learner Wheel and Understanding the World. These are the outcomes we are aspiring to for all our learners.
When introducing a new topic or teaching core subjects, teachers encourage children to identify the values and apples they might be using or showing through their learning. For example, when the children completed the sponsored run we discussed the values of love and service, which developed the apples of “understanding the world” and “challenge”. We also talked about how we had shown perseverance from our learning wheel.
When looking at the lifecycle of a hen, we discussed Thankfulness for nature, which led to a discussion on other lifecycles and understanding the world, which moved into a conversation and debate about the morality of killing chickens for food!
When planning Topics, teachers always start from the Roots and Fruits – and activities are then planned which will teach the values and apples as well as covering the statutory curriculum content.
Visit our Curriculum pages to find out more about the different areas.