St Mary's C of E School Truro

St Mary's C of E School

"Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young. Be an example to all believers, in what you say, in the way you live, in your love, your faith and your purity."1 Timothy 4:12

Design Technology

Sunrise Curriculum Intent

Our unique Sunrise curriculum is research informed to build children's interests in powerful knowledge and skills, supported by long term memory pedagogy to create life long aspirations. This is underpinned by the school vision 'You are never too young to make a difference.'

 

Design Technology Intent

Our Design Technology curriculum forms part of the St Marys Sunrise Curriculum. At St Marys, it is our intention through Design Technology to give children the opportunity to develop skills, knowledge and understanding of designing and making functional products.

We want to nurture children to explore the designed and made world, so that they can be creative and innovative in their own designs. Through systematic and progressive planning we intend to give the children the skills to communicate their ideas to others, enhance their technical knowledge to make functional products and develop their critical thinking so that they can evaluate their own and existing products.  As children progress through KS2 they will also look at famous designers and the cost effectiveness and sustainability of products.

Our school vision is “You are never too young to make a difference”; by inspiring our children to become designers and makers they could help solve the real life problems that individuals, a society or the world is facing. Whether this is making an easy open food container, or developing a new technology to harness renewable energy; Design Technology impacts significantly on everyone’s quality of life

Lots of our Design and Technology curriculum is inspired by resources from the Design & Technology Association.  You can visit their website here.

 

SEND and Design Technology

Design and Technology is a popular and valuable subject for pupils with special educational needs. Knowledge and understanding is drawn across the curriculum and it can enable numeracy, literacy and communication skills that can be applied in practical ways.

The making of practical functioning products consolidates and reinforces multicurricular learning with positive outcomes.

 

  • A spiral curriculum (revisit and revise) - At the start of the lesson, children will be revisiting the vocabulary and keys facts they have learnt. This will give children with SEN more time and opportunities to understand the concepts and vital knowledge they need to access the learning. 
  • A variety of methods for recording ideas quickly is provided to pupils and teachers do not enforce rigid approaches when it comes to recording and communicating design ideas and developments.
  • When focussing on physical making of designs, teachers consider support, specialist equipment, the adaptation of room layouts and whether extra time is required.
  • Visual word maps - Where appropriate we create a visual word mat for your children with SEN. These can be used to pre-teach new vocabulary prior to the lesson, to help children visualise the concepts they are using in class and to help with spelling and writing activities.