Our curriculum is rich, broad and balanced. We have designed a bespoke curriculum, combining discrete subject teaching with cross-curricular topics. Gallions has had a long-term commitment to developing the whole-child; creating a curriculum that is text and language rich and teaching excellence in the creative arts.
We teach English through an evolving set of quality texts and, where possible, these texts link with wider curriculum areas to add depth to our children’s knowledge.
Each term, we have a whole-school project theme. In the Autumn Term, ‘We are Scientists’ and we discover; in the Spring Term, ‘We are Historians’ and we time travel; in the Summer Term, we are Geographers and we explore. The termly projects have a cross-curricular approach, combining English and foundation subjects. Each year-group has an overarching question, such as ‘Who were the greatest invaders?’ or ‘Is the air in Beckton clean?’.
The question guides their learning across the project. Each project ends with a finale, where the children are challenged to be experts, sharing their knowledge with an audience. This gives purpose to learning and engages our pupils to have a depth of knowledge in their subject area and use expert vocabulary too.
If you would like to know more about our curriculum, please read our curriculum intent.
Specialist Teaching
We extend and enhance our curriculum through specialist teaching in: Performing Arts, Music and Philosophy for Children (P4C). We value these subjects as individual disciplines, as well as see the wider benefits on children’s personal development and well-being.
We have a Music Centre, completed in 2014, where rooms are designed specifically for learning either the violin, cello or double bass, as well as a large space for musicianship lessons. We have a large team of specialist teachers, who deliver musicianship through the Kodaly approach and from Year 2 – Year 6, every child has weekly instrumental lessons; many go on to join our orchestra and ensemble groups.
Our Performing Arts Lead teaches across Year 1 – Year 6 and has designed a bespoke curriculum which develops our pupils as performers, with every child involved in productions, from the costume design, script writing, dancing and performing.
Teachers across the school are trained in P4C and deliver weekly lessons, guided by our specialist Lead Practitioner in Philosophy. As well as developing oracy skills, this challenges our children to think, to question, to listen to others and develop their views on the world, often using knowledge from the wider curriculum.
