St Vincent's Catholic Primary School

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

‘Living and Learning’- Key Stage One

We have enjoyed finding the answer to our driving question for our Autumn term project ‘How do our mistakes help us to learn?’ We enjoyed exploring a range of texts with a moral message. We were able to identify what mistake each character made in each story and reflect on how they could rectify their mistakes and learn from them. Our favourite book this term was ‘The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes’. We discussed our own mistakes, refelcting on how these helped us.

We have explored the human body and looked at the importance of healthy living. We know what may happen if we make the mistake of not looking after ourselves.

We used the outdoors to problem solve as a team, working together to investigate, make mistakes along the way and evaluate how our mistakes helped us to learn and improve. In line with our Vincentian Value for this term, ‘We believe in practical hands-on hard work and we learn from our mistakes.

We learnt that having a growth mindset is the key to success. We were able to relefct on our own mindsets and discuss ways to change these to enable us to be better learners. We know that making mistakes is a process of learning and mistakes help us to better ourselves.

To consolidate our learning and spread the message and answer to our driving question we designed and made our very own ‘Mistake Boxes. ‘ We visited other classes across the school to showcase our learning and explain how mistakes help us to learn. We also created a Powerpoint Presentation for others to find out information about how mistakes help us to learn and to remind us of all the things we have learnt this term.

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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.