Design & Technology – curriculum information

Intent

At Townville Infant and Nursery School, we aspire to offer the best possible early education for all our children in a happy, safe, inclusive environment.

Through our DT Curriculum we aim to ensure our Key Stage 1 children:

• Have exciting and enjoyable experiences of Design and Technology, where they can acquire and develop their own designing and making skills in order to make a range of products.
• Confidently take risks when designing and making products.
• Are inspired by engineers, designers, chefs and architects to enable them to create a range of structures and food products with a real-life purpose.
• Have the knowledge and skills which promote resourcefulness and innovation.
• Develop their ability to be confident and creative problem solvers.
• Are confident to work both individually and as part of a team.
• To be prepared to take an active part in the development of tomorrow’s rapidly changing world.

This builds upon the children’s prior knowledge gained through the Early Years Foundation stage for DT where children:

• Use their imagination to design and create models.
• Select their own materials and join them together, exploring different textures.
• Safely use a range of small tools.
• Discuss which materials are most suitable for their designs.
• Share their creations with others and explain the process they have used to create them.
• Learn to make alterations if their ideas don’t work.
• Look at simple mechanisms for how models work.
• Explore and talk about different food and where it comes from.
• Regularly engage in activities involving the understanding of good hygiene and the importance of making healthy food choices.

Implementation

As creative and investigative learners’ children in EYFS are given the opportunity to create freely expressing their own ideas, talking about what they are making and what they need to make it. They are challenged to experiment with the best materials for that purpose and are encouraged to reason their decisions for the choice they have made. They are also given many opportunities to experiment with different ways of joining materials together using a variety of resources. They are challenged to work out for themselves which joining method is best for which purpose.

In KS1, DT is taught through a 2-year rolling program designed to inspire children’s curiosity so they know and understand about food and where food comes from and designing and making products. We follow the Curriculum Maestro Scheme for DT which is a carefully planned and sequenced curriculum. It provides teachers with fantastic week-by-week lessons filled with enrichment activities to engage children and broaden their experiences. The scheme supports all the knowledge and skills requirements of the National Curriculum but we also tailor the lessons to the needs of our children and the outcomes for each half term are carefully plotted out against the National Curriculum ensuring full coverage and progression. Children are taught an DT based topic every term.

Within each DT lesson, children are explicitly told that they are working as ‘designers’, ‘ architects’ or ‘ chefs’ depending on the topic. They are reminded of the key knowledge and skills they will learn, use and develop throughout their DT lessons. They are also introduced to specific key vocabulary which is reinforced during each lesson, giving the children ample opportunities to use this language and understand its meaning as they discuss their DT work and evaluate their work in comparison with each other. Ongoing assessment of the children’s knowledge and skills is used by class teachers to ensure that any misconceptions are addressed, and next steps carefully planned for enabling each child to make progress.

Impact

As a result of our carefully sequenced, planned and taught DT curriculum, children will:

• Have exciting and enjoyable experiences of Design and Technology, where they can acquire and develop their own designing and making skills in order to make a range of products.
• Confidently take risks when designing and making products.
• Are inspired by engineers, designers, chefs and architects to enable them to create a range of structures and food products with a real-life purpose.
• Have the knowledge and skills which promote resourcefulness and innovation.
• Develop their ability to be confident and creative problem solvers.
• Are confident to work both individually and as part of a team.
• To be prepared to take an active part in the development of tomorrow’s rapidly changing world.

Townville children will meet the end of Key Stage 1 National curriculum outcomes and will have a strong foundation on which to build and further develop their skills and knowledge of DT and food technology

Further information: