Developing a love of learning. Always ready to learn

The curriculum at Kinsale Infant school fosters a love of learning and empowers all children to be ready to learn. It is broad, balanced, ambitious and innovative.  Underpinned by the expectations of the Early Years Foundation Stage or National Curriculum, the Kinsale curriculum is knowledge-rich, develops disciplinary skills in all areas and ensures children build key vocabulary and concepts at every stage.

Our high expectations and aspirations for each child create the possibility for all children to become a reader, a writer, a mathematician and apply these capabilities across a range of other areas of learning. Understanding the needs of all our children, we aim to provide them with learning tools and scaffolds to achieve and succeed.

The curriculum has a clear progression of knowledge and skills beginning in the Early years Foundation Stage and building on into Key Stage one. Knowing the learning destination that we want our children to reach, we teach backwards using children’s prior knowledge as starting points and sequence learning from here to build greater disciplinary knowledge and skills.

We believe that children need to develop their emotional understanding and resilience to flourish and to be able to learn how to regulate themselves to be happy and safe learners. We show the children what it is to be kind, caring, thoughtful and respectful. These are our school values. 

We want our children to produce exceptional outcomes whilst developing their independence, curiosity, creative and critical thinking.  We want to produce collaborators and reflective learners. These are our learning dispositions, the things that make us good learners.

We want children to make connections between their learning in school and understand and apply this learning to the diverse and wider world around them. We want them to know what it means to be human.

Curriculum Maps

Each term we produce a curriculum map with the skills that each year group will learn. The projects may change each year depending on the interests of the children.

In Reception, lots of the learning is based on the children’s interests, which cannot be planned for the term. The initial curriculum map will show the development of skills and the knowledge which will be initiated by adults. The curriculum map will then be updated at the end of each term to show the children’s independent learning.

In Key Stage One we teach a number of different concepts during the project so that the children are able to make greater links within their learning. Concepts are things that float around in our heads and inform our thoughts, beliefs and most aspects of our thinking – things like ‘kindness’, ‘honesty’, ‘fairness’, ‘equality’ and ‘belonging’.

Please speak to your child’s class teacher if you would like any further information.