St Vincent's Catholic Primary School

“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!”
Psalm 133.1

‘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:

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.