‘Human Beings Are Curious’

Daniel T Willingham

At High Halden CofE Primary School, we believe that alongside statutory requirements it is also important for children to be taught skills to equip them to be lifelong learners and to prepare them for life beyond High Halden.To support this, we actively develop thinking, questioning, problem solving and creative skills.  Children are encouraged to become independent learners, be decisive and confident in the decisions they make, be good citizens who can develop healthy and positive relationships with others and  remain healthy and resilient. 

As a result of this, our enquiry based curriculum aims to inspire and motivate children to find answers for themselves. We believes this further underpins the knowledge, understanding and skills of our curriculum. The idea of this learning is to reflect our desire to explore, develop & enhance our fundamental concepts in every year group, over time. Over the year, each class explores 6 themed questions, linked to their topic or science. Throughout each half term, as part of every lesson and learning opportunity, children focus on learning questions which contribute towards their development or answering the themed question for that term. At the end of the topic, children collate and apply their new knowledge, understanding  and skills to provide a detailed answer to the themed topic question for that half term. Examples of these can be seen below.  

We believe that this approach is essential to a child's development as while assimilation of facts and knowledge is an essential part of learning, it is not enough to secure deep understanding. It is through finding and exploring for themselves that children can make meaningful links in their knowledge, which in turn secures their understanding.