Halfway Nursery Infant School

Design & Technology 

Intent

At Halfway Nursery Infant School Design and Technology supports the aims of the national curriculum:

• develop the creative, technical and practical expertise needed to perform everyday tasks confidently and to participate successfully in an increasingly technological world
• build and apply a repertoire of knowledge, understanding and skills in order to design and make high-quality prototypes and products for a wide range of users
• critique, evaluate and test their ideas and products and the work of others
• understand and apply the principles of nutrition and learn how to cook.

We aim to equip our pupils with investigative and creative skills which can be transferable across many other aspects of the national curriculum. Our Design and Technology curriculum is exciting and practical, whilst encouraging creativity and innovation to solve real life problems. We aim to teach our children to confidently take risks, make errors, and make adventurous decisions to improve products.

Our curriculum supports the development of the children’s knowledge when designing, making, and evaluating.

Implementation

In Key stage one, each year group has a focus and skills are revisited as they move through our school, to ensure that disciplinary knowledge and substantive knowledge is remembered and built upon. The units are planned to ensure that they are sequential from unit to unit and year group to year group, with knowledge from previous year groups being built upon each time.  

Year 1 - Exploring Mechanisms Sliders and Levers and Building Structures

Year 2 - Exploring Mechanisms Wheels and Axels and Textiles

Cooking and Nutrition is covered as part of a whole school week with links to science.

In EYFS, Design and Technology is covered across the 7 areas of learning. These are taught as the year progresses as experiences and opportunism occur as well as through planned direct adult teaching. Design and Technology links are supported through the areas of learning ‘Expressive Arts and Design – Creating with Materials and Physical’. Through adult led activities children are exposed to learning around mechanisms, food, textiles and structures. These activities are focused on the skills in order to allow them to develop their independence within our provisions. Teaching and learning is based on the children’s interests and stories which we are focusing on to create a context. Communication and language is crucial at this stage to extend learning through a range of different approaches such as questioning, reasoning and clarifying. Children have access to the EAD contentious provision daily which supports the design and technology curriculum.

Impact

We assess the children’s work in design and technology whilst observing them working during lessons. Teachers assess the progress made by children against the learning objectives for their lessons. At the end of each academic year we make a judgement and record each child’s progress against the National Curriculum levels of attainment. This information is used to plan future work as well as forming part of the annual report to parents.

By the end of each key stage, pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant programme of study.

Our long term design and technology planning has also been designed to revisit key knowledge and skills over the years to help develop and sustain foundation knowledge.

We want children to leave KS1 with the skills to perform everyday tasks, to design and make purposeful products, evaluate and improve ideas.

Design and technology whole school overview