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Acorn Computing
Empowering Learners...Growing Minds
We aim to...
Empowering Learners
- Be critical thinkers and able to understand how to make informed and appropriate digital choices in the future.
- Understand the importance that computing will have going forward in both their educational and working life and their social and personal futures
- Understand how to balance time spent on technology and time spent away from it in a healthy and appropriate manner.
- Understand that technology helps to showcase their ideas and creativity. They will know that the different types of software and hardware can help them achieve a broad variety of artistic and practical aims.
- Be able to use technology both individually and as part of a collaborative team.
- Be aware of online safety issues and protocols and be able to deal with any problems in a responsible and appropriate manner.
- Have an awareness of developments in technology and have an idea of how current technologies work and relate to one another.
Growing Minds
- Meet the end of key stage expectations outlined in the National curriculum for Computing.
- Show a clear progression of technical skills across all areas of the National curriculum – computer science, information technology and digital literacy.
Intent
At Kidsgrove Primary School, we aim to instil a sense of enjoyment around using technology and to develop pupil’s appreciation of its capabilities and the opportunities technology offers to create, manage, organise and collaborate. As a school, we want to develop pupils’ confidence when encountering new technology. Through our curriculum we intend for our pupils to be responsible, online citizens, have a range of transferable skills that will ready pupils for the future and to become digitally competent.
Implementation
At Kidsgrove, we use the Kapow Primary Scheme, which we follow for our computing curriculum. The scheme is organised into five key areas, creating a cyclical route through which pupils can develop their computing knowledge and skills by revisiting and build on previous learning:
- Computer systems and networks
- Programming
- Creating media
- Data handling
- Online safety
The implementation of Kapow Primary Computing ensures a broad and balanced coverage of the National curriculum requirements, and the ‘skills showcase’ units provide pupils with the opportunity to learn and apply transferable skills. Where meaningful, units have been created to link to other subjects such as science, art and music to enable the development of further transferable skills and genuine cross-curricular learning.
Lessons incorporate a range of teaching strategies from independent tasks, paired and group work as well as unplugged and digital activities. This variety means that lessons are engaging and appeal to those with a variety of learning styles. Differentiated guidance is available for every lesson to ensure that lessons can be accessed by all pupils and opportunities to stretch pupils’ learning in building a foundation of factual knowledge by encouraging recall of key facts and vocabulary.
Strong subject knowledge is vital for staff to be able to deliver a highly effective and robust curriculum. Each of the units of lessons include teacher videos to develop subject knowledge and support ongoing CPD. Kapow ensures every teacher feels supported to deliver a computing curriculum to a high standard that ensures pupil progression.
The impact of our curriculum is constantly monitored through both formative and summative assessment opportunities. Each lesson includes guidance to support teachers in assessing pupils against learning objectives and each unit has a quiz and knowledge catcher which can be used at the start and/or end of the unit.
Children leave Kidsgrove Primary School equipped with a range of skills to enable them to succeed in their secondary education and be active participants in the ever-increasing digital world.
Computing Documents