St Vincent's Catholic Primary School

“Caritas Christi Urget Nos –

The love of Christ urges us to care for each other and strive for excellence in everything we do.”

‘How Do We Survive?’ – UKS2

As we come to the end of the Autumn Term, we have been trying to answer our driving question for this term, ‘How Do We Survive?’ This was based off our Vincentian Value for this term, ‘We believe in practical hands-on hard work and we learn from our mistakes.’ This has led us to look at South America and the Amazon Rainforest in more depth, how plants and animals survive, how ancient civilisations came and went, what it means to be sustainable, and how we can help the society to do better in order to survive.

We looked at different features and characteristics of South America. How do they compare with the UK?

When looking at what makes plants different from animals, we looked at various species comparing their life cycles and reproductive cycles to help differentiate.

The students have conducted various experiments including cloning a potato (pictured above) and mummifying a fruit (pictured below) as part of our project based learning.

What was the secret to surviving longer? We looked at some ancient civilisations to find out – the Sumerians, Indus Valley, the Egyptians, the Shang Dynasty, Incas and Amazonian tribes faced different kinds of adversity such as extreme drought, civil wars, threats from neighbouring territories amongst other things. Subsequently, we created a timeline to investigate their rise and fall.

What does energy have to do with our survival? How can we survive better than previous groups? Not only have we looked at what it means to be sustainable, but how other cities compared with London. In addition to learning about sustainable energy sources and food, we were able to make our own fairtrade chocolate treats! We didn’t stop there, after looking at health and nutrition, we created our own labels for our products; we practised using a design program to outline what sorts of ingredients and other important packaging features.

By educating ourselves on the purpose of fair trade and how energy sources work can we better understand how societies are built, develop and flourish. By trying to understand the past, can we hope that we can better prepare for the future to outlast our predecessors.

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Curriculum Intent

At St Vincent’s it is our INTENT is to enable ALL children to thrive through the opportunities we provide them with, in order to:

  • Live their lives by the Gospel and Vincentian values instilled in them at school.
  • Understand that everyone has the right and responsibility to live in our world constructively and ensure that we leave it in a better state than when we entered it by living and working through the principles of Catholic Social Teaching in line with the UNCRC (United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child)
  • Experience creativity across the curriculum through specialist art and dance lessons and opportunities to take part in art, music, dance and creative writing competitions.
  • Know the joy of outdoor learning, the rich biodiversity within our school grounds and locality and develop a responsibility for the environment we share as stewards.
  • Understand their place in the world, globally and locally, knowing the history of our school, Mill Hill and the Daughters of Charity and knowing where our diverse community members have their roots across the world.
  • Be ready and well-prepared for their next steps in life, having high aspirations for themselves and for others because they have experienced success and a belief in learning from mistakes.
  • Have a life-long curiosity, stimulated by the driving questions of Project Based Learning approach to the curriculum fostering inquiry and independent learning skills, which give confidence to ask big questions about the world.
  • Be literate and numerate having experienced a rich variety of texts to stimulate and excite the mind while developing skills in investigating and problem solving to enable them to excel in their future passions.
  • Be confident and happy young people that have a broad understanding and tolerance of the world and others around them with excellent communication skills honed by their experience of Restorative Justice and respect of the dignity and wishes of the individual.

Curriculum Context

St Vincent’s is a 1.5 form entry school with 285 children ranging from 4 -11. Children come predominantly from the parishes of Sacred Heart in Mill Hill and St Anthony’s in Edgware.

Children come from a diverse range of socio-economic backgrounds, speak 17 different languages and hail from 26 different ethnic groups. The curriculum we present, and promote, to the children is an endeavour to reflect these differences by providing opportunities to explore the different countries, languages and customs our children are part of through the projects they investigate. We have looked closely at the context of our school, the backgrounds of the children and how life is for a child growing up in North London today. We have used the underlying principles of our Catholic Faith and the example of our namesake St Vincent to create a set of values which lie at the heart of our curriculum.

We are aware of the changing nature of society and the pressures faced by young children as they enter the next stage of their education. The rise in Mental Health related issues has been widely documented across the media. Therefore, issues such as internet safety and the enormous impact across society of social media are at the forefront of our minds when planning our curriculum. With the current worldwide concerns relating to Covid 19, racial justice, equality and diversity, as well as gender and economic background, we feel it is our duty to prepare the children through a concerted focus on building independence, resilience and communication skills linked to our Vincentian Values.