Design and Technology

^{At Cullercoats Primary School we offer all our children a wide breadth of creative experiences and provide opportunities to develop a range of valuable, lifelong skills.}

Subject Lead - Mr Jonny Reed

INTENT

At Cullercoats Primary School we offer all our children a wide breadth of creative experiences and provide opportunities to develop a range of valuable, lifelong skills. The children are taught to critically design effective products for specific users. We use appropriate tools safely and effectively. In all areas of Design and Technology projects the children are encouraged to consider the effectiveness of their designs at all stages of the process and consider the requirements of the product in relation to who they are designing for. Every child will have the opportunity to learn and extend their understanding, experience and application in the use of technology in a variety of situations. We make good use of our plentiful school garden, greenhouse and expansive orchard to support (and supply where possible ingredients for) the food technology aspects of the curriculum which also have great cross curricular links to science and healthy living.  

IMPLEMENTATION

There are five strands to the Cullercoats Design and Technology curriculum: Mechanisms, Textiles, Structures, Electrical Systems and Food Technology. Every phase of the school teaches each one of these strands, building on the techniques and strategies from the previous phase and developing skills in each of these areas. In each phase the designing and evaluating will become more thorough and the use of tools will advance in complexity. As they move through the school children will be given greater opportunity to use C.A.D, Computer Aided Design, through programs such as Google Sketchup, Purple Mash, Tinkercad and Lego Spike Prime. They will be given opportunities to explore processes in their local environment, making excellent use of our nursery planters, school garden, greenhouse, vegetable beds and apple orchard.  Pupils may also extend their knowledge of a history or geography topic or a Talk4Writing text through Design and Technology lessons. Our locality enables the school to draw upon a wide variety of DT examples. Structures such as the Swing, Tyne and Millennium Bridges, along with local parks and relevant coastal structures give us much scope to explore DT in the world around us.  

Our teaching of Design and Technology is underpinned by Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, ensuring that learning is broken into small steps, supported by regular review, explicit modelling, guided practice, regular checking for understanding, and opportunities for independent practice and design.  

IMPACT

Pupils will have an understanding and an appreciation of the design process. They will have experienced working iteratively and have a desire to improve on what they have produced. Through our Design and Technology curriculum pupils will have built up strong independent and interpersonal skills such as perseverance, team working and have a strong sense of pride in their work and capabilities. Pupils will be able to express themselves creatively and with a strong technological vocabulary. Through the use of increasingly complex tools, including ICT, pupils will have safely developed useful, valuable, lifelong skills and be ready for the secondary school curriculum. We measure the impact and progress of our Design and Technology curriculum through continual summative assessment and discussions with children about their learning. We use book monitoring and Seesaw to celebrate work.  

One of the ways in which the impact of our Design and Technology curriculum can be seen is through our hugely successful Lego Robotics programme, which has led to us national finals on numerous occasions and even a National Award for Core Values in February 2020; (we are so far the only North East primary school to ever reach this stage). 

SKILLS MAPPING DOCUMENTS