Science at St James’ CofE Junior School is about developing children’s sense of enquiry and extending their knowledge and understanding of the world around them. Science lessons are a mixture of practical and theory, and wherever possible links to other areas of curriculum allowing the children more in-depth learning. Children are encouraged to carry out full scientific enquiries and investigate the concept of fair testing.

The Teachers at St James’ plan Science lessons that build knowledge and understanding with regular revisiting and connections made to previous topics. 

Key Stage 2: Lower
Having established the foundational scientific concepts, we now add depth to their understanding of the areas from KS1 and broaden the range of topics and concepts studied; rocks, human impact on living things - conservation and pollution, and eventually, states of matter, sound, and electricity. Children are immersed and progressively build on their foundational scientific knowledge and vocabulary. Assessment provides clear guidance as to where each pupil is in their individual learning journey, enabling teachers to adjust the style of delivery or repeat a resource if required. Children become more conversant with the world of work through high quality dialogue that applies STEM knowledge to the professional context. We continue to encourage children to be inquisitive pond dipping or investigating dead trees for life, or testing material resistance to glass paper, or impact testing to list characteristics; then to chart and classify their data and form narratives from their findings developing their skills to work scientifically.

Key Stage 2: Upper
We ensure topics are visited at each key stage progressively, adhering to the National Curriculum, this is reinforced through revisiting each topic and strand. By Year 5 and Year 6, pupils are becoming confident and independent young scientists. Through their explorations, they raise questions, make simple hypotheses that they test, collect data for, then subject to analysis and report from. The breadth of study includes the solar system, forces, light and evolution. They have developed their language and communication through their study of key words and high quality dialogue from experts in the field. 

Wherever possible we build on local expertise have many close links with industry, local science parks and STEM ambassadors.  This gives a sense of purpose to our scientific and design work.

In all of our subjects, we use our collaborative approach named Learn 2 Learn, that puts collaboration and talk at the heart of learning.

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