Brockmoor Primary School: Science Curriculum

A Curriculum That Develops Inquisitive, Knowledgeable, and Analytical Thinkers

At Brockmoor Primary School, we believe that science is the lens through which children explore, understand, and question the world around them. Science fuels curiosity, fosters critical thinking, and enables pupils to develop a deep understanding of the natural world, physical phenomena, and the processes that govern them.

Our science curriculum is underpinned by CUSP (Curriculum with Unity Schools Partnership), an evidence-led, knowledge-rich approach that ensures pupils develop:

🔬 Substantive Knowledge – Core scientific concepts in biology, chemistry, and physics, sequenced for long-term retention.
🧠 Disciplinary Knowledge – Scientific enquiry skills, including working scientifically, investigating, analysing, and interpreting data.
📖 A Vocabulary-Rich Approach – Explicit teaching of tiered vocabulary, enabling pupils to articulate scientific concepts with precision.
🔄 Cumulative Learning – Knowledge builds progressively, interweaving prior learning and new concepts for a coherent understanding.
🌍 Real-World Application – Science in the classroom is linked to the wider world, careers, and everyday life, making learning relevant and inspiring.

Our ambition is that every child leaves Brockmoor as a confident, analytical thinker who can apply scientific knowledge to real-world situations, ask critical questions, and seek solutions to problems.

As part of our commitment to high-quality science education, we are working towards achieving the Science Quality Mark, demonstrating our dedication to excellence in science teaching and learning. Additionally, we work with the Community Bees Project and Keele University, providing real-world scientific engagement opportunities. Pupils also take part in annual Science Days, which allow them to explore practical investigations, STEM challenges, and hands-on experiments that ignite curiosity and excitement for science.

A Knowledge-Rich, Systematic Science Curriculum

The CUSP Science Curriculum ensures a coherent, structured approach to science, with knowledge carefully sequenced and interleaved to secure understanding and retention.

Key Principles of the CUSP Science Model

✅ Three Distinct Scientific Disciplines – Biology, Chemistry, and Physics are explicitly taught, ensuring depth and rigour.
✅ Conceptual Coherence and Progression – Scientific knowledge and skills build cumulatively from EYFS to Year 6.
✅ Working Scientifically – Pupils develop skills in questioning, observing, classifying, testing, researching, measuring, and analysing data.
✅ Common Misconceptions Addressed – Explicitly teaching scientific truths vs. misconceptions ensures a secure understanding.
✅ Scientific Literacy and Vocabulary Development – Teaching and applying scientific vocabulary in context supports articulate expression.

Through this approach, pupils not only learn scientific facts but develop the ability to think, reason, and work scientifically.

Science in the Early Years: Building the Foundations of Scientific Thinking

In EYFS, children develop foundational scientific knowledge through "Understanding the World," focusing on:

🔹 Observing the Natural World – Noticing plants, animals, weather, and seasonal changes.
🔹 Early Scientific Vocabulary – Developing language to describe objects, materials, and living things.
🔹 Cause and Effect Exploration – Investigating how things change, grow, and react (e.g., mixing substances, watching seeds grow).
🔹 Encouraging Curiosity – Structured play-based activities designed to promote questioning and exploration.

These foundations ensure that children enter Key Stage 1 with a strong scientific awareness and curiosity.

The Structure of a CUSP Science Lesson

Each science lesson follows a structured, research-informed model, ensuring systematic teaching, deep understanding, and scientific thinking.

Lesson Phases

1️⃣ Connect – Activating prior knowledge, linking new concepts to what pupils already know.
2️⃣ Explain – Explicit vocabulary instruction and teacher-led explanations of new concepts.
3️⃣ Example – Modelling scientific thinking, processes, and practical investigation techniques.
4️⃣ Attempt – Guided practice, with scaffolding and questioning to deepen understanding.
5️⃣ Apply – Independent scientific investigation, analysis, or explanation of concepts.
6️⃣ Challenge – Higher-order thinking, including evaluating scientific ideas, drawing conclusions, and discussing real-world applications.

This approach ensures pupils actively engage in scientific discovery, developing confidence in their knowledge and investigative skills.

Working Scientifically: Developing the Skills of a Scientist

Science is not just knowledge acquisition; it is about thinking and working like a scientist. Our curriculum ensures that pupils develop disciplinary knowledge by engaging in:

🔬 Observing and Classifying – Identifying patterns, differences, and relationships in scientific phenomena.
📊 Measuring and Testing – Conducting fair tests and comparative investigations to explore cause and effect.
🧪 Experimenting and Predicting – Forming hypotheses and testing ideas through structured investigations.
📖 Researching and Explaining – Using secondary sources to deepen understanding and communicate findings clearly.
🔄 Interpreting Data and Drawing Conclusions – Recording, analysing, and presenting findings in charts, tables, and written explanations.

These skills are explicitly taught and progressively refined across all year groups, ensuring pupils become confident scientific thinkers.

The CUSP Science Curriculum: Progression Across Key Stages

Key Stage 1: Exploring the Natural World

📌 Biology – Animals including humans, plants, habitats, and life cycles.
📌 Chemistry – Everyday materials and their properties.
📌 Physics – Seasonal changes, light, and simple forces.
📌 Working Scientifically – Observing, classifying, simple testing, and recording results.

Lower Key Stage 2: Building Scientific Knowledge and Enquiry

📌 Biology – Nutrition, skeletons, muscles, plants, and ecosystems.
📌 Chemistry – Rocks, materials, and states of matter.
📌 Physics – Forces, magnets, sound, and electricity.
📌 Working Scientifically – Comparative testing, predicting, measuring, and using data to explain findings.

Upper Key Stage 2: Deepening Understanding and Thinking Scientifically

📌 Biology – Circulatory system, evolution, classification, and adaptation.
📌 Chemistry – Properties of materials, irreversible changes, and separation techniques.
📌 Physics – Electricity, light, Earth and Space, and complex forces.
📌 Working Scientifically – Designing investigations, identifying variables, analysing patterns, and making evaluations.

This structured approach ensures systematic development of scientific knowledge and skills, preparing pupils for KS3 and beyond.

Science in the Real World: Careers and Cultural Capital

We ensure that pupils see science as a pathway to real-world opportunities by embedding:

🧑‍🔬 Careers in Science – Learning about scientists, engineers, and innovators who have shaped our world.
🌍 Environmental and Ethical Science – Understanding climate change, sustainability, and the role of science in society.
🚀 STEM Opportunities – Engaging with engineering, computing, and medical sciences, inspiring future aspirations.
🌱 Community Bees Project – Working with local organisations to learn about biodiversity, pollination, and environmental conservation.
🔬 Partnership with Keele University – Giving pupils access to university-led science workshops and experiments.

The Impact: What Our Science Curriculum Achieves

By the time pupils leave Brockmoor Primary, they are:

🎓 Scientifically literate – Equipped with knowledge and skills to engage with science confidently.
🔬 Curious and analytical thinkers – Able to ask questions, investigate, and solve problems.
📖 Articulate communicators – Using scientific vocabulary to explain, reason, and justify their ideas.
🚀 Prepared for the future – With the foundation to succeed in KS3 science and beyond.

Further Information

For more details, including:
📌 CUSP Science Knowledge Documents
📌 Curriculum Overviews
📌 Home Science Activities

Please contact our Curriculum Lead, Tom Amphlett, at info@brockmoor.dudley.sch.uk.

IMPLEMENTATION

CUSP Science is structured on the principles of cumulative knowledge. This cumulative model has a profound impact, providing opportunities for children to make associations and connections with significant periods of time, people, places, and events.

What do we teach?

EARLY YEARS

The Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum enhances children's comprehension of Science through the planning and delivery of 'Understanding the World.' In this phase, children explore objects, materials, and living things using all of their senses, examining similarities, differences, patterns, and change. The environment, coupled with skilled practitioners, nurtures curiosity and encourages explorative play. Children are motivated to pose questions about why things happen and how things work. Our approach encourages children to utilize their natural surroundings for exploration.

Outdoors, children delight in investigating mini-beasts and their habitats, observing the changing seasons, plants, and animals. During the spring term, children enjoy a unique firsthand experience of hatching and caring for live chicks. Additionally, children actively participate in cookery and baking sessions, providing them with an opportunity to witness changes in state as ingredients are mixed, heated, and cooled.

Overview

KEY STAGE 1

In Key Stage 1, pupils delve into the study of Seasons, fostering an early conceptual understanding of the transition from day to night. This exploration of change over time seamlessly links to the examination of plants, with a specific focus on trees. This emphasis allows children to recognise trees as integral to the plant kingdom and observe the transformations deciduous trees undergo in tandem with the changing seasons.

In a contrasting exploration, pupils delve into the realm of animals, including humans. Non-examples of plants are employed to highlight and contrast the distinctive features of animals.

Pupils are introduced to the identification and classification of materials. Scientific terminology, such as transparent, translucent, and opaque, is explicitly taught through vocabulary instruction. Pupils then solidify their understanding by applying these terms to their existing knowledge, further reinforcing these concepts through scientific tasks. This substantive knowledge is enriched as pupils seamlessly integrate disciplinary knowledge acquired through scientific enquiry.

Within the broader exploration of Living Things and Their Habitats and the Uses of Everyday Materials, pupils construct new substantive knowledge. This knowledge is then comprehensively assimilated through the application of Working and Thinking Scientifically tasks.

LOWER KEY STAGE 2

The module on rocks is explored, building on previous knowledge acquired from 'Everyday materials' in KS1. A comprehensive study of Animals, including humans, expands on the foundation laid in KS1, contrasting physical features with the functions they perform, such as the examination of the skeleton and muscles.

The rocks unit is revisited to refine and deepen pupils’ understanding, further advancing their knowledge.

Forces and magnets are introduced, aligning with KS1 materials and encompassing concepts like twisting, bending, and squashing. Contact and non-contact forces are taught, and understanding is applied through Working and Thinking Scientifically. The abstract concept of light is made tangible by exploring light sources and shadows. Plants are scrutinised to cultivate a more sophisticated understanding of their parts and functions, including the intricate process of pollination.

A focused study of Living Things and Their Habitats pays meticulous attention to classification, directly incorporating prior knowledge to ensure the establishment of secure conceptual frameworks. This study interconnects animals, plants, and environments, with a summarised emphasis on positive and negative changes.

Electricity is introduced, with pupils acquiring understanding about electrical sources, safety, and components of a single-loop circuit.

The Animals, including humans segment concentrates on the sequence of digestion, tracing the process from the mouth to excretion.

States of matter and sound are taught, drawing on the particle theory. Practical scientific tasks and tests assist pupils in building a coherent understanding of the particle theory by applying their knowledge through structured scientific enquiry.

UPPER KEY STAGE 2

Pupils employ and build upon their comprehension of states of matter in the exploration of properties and changes of materials.

Change is further examined within animals, including humans, with a focus on the growth and development of both humans and animals.

Earth in space advances the conceptual understanding of our position in the universe.

A detailed study of Forces refines the substantive knowledge acquired in KS1 and LKS2. To enhance this study, pupils delve into the life and work of Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642), considered the father of modern science.

Living things and their habitats centre on variations in the life cycles of living things and their reproductive processes. This study also juxtaposes previous scientific perspectives.

A comprehensive exploration of living things and their habitats empowers pupils in UKS2 to revisit and expand their understanding of classification, following the taxonomy devised by Carl Linnaeus. More intricate animals are examined.

Light is revisited and taught with advanced substantive knowledge. This physics study focuses on the properties of light rather than the biology of the eye.

How do pupils learn

• Class timetables have been built to ensure a broad and balanced curriculum.  

• Subjects have been blocked in a spaced retrieval model to support catch up and to build the frequency of science and wider curriculum subjects. This maximises learning time. 

An essential component to CUSP lessons is the systematic and coherent approach that we embed focusing on the six phases of a lesson.

OVERVIEW OF KNOWLEDGE 

Each unit includes an overview for the teacher which details the big idea that pupils will be studying, prior knowledge, skills to be taught and common misconceptions.  

MAPPING OF KNOWLEDGE

The sequence of learning makes clear essential and desirable knowledge, key questions and task suggestions for each lesson and suggested cumulative quizzing questions.

KNOWLEDGE ORGANISERS

Dual coded knowledge organisers contain core information for children to easily access and use as a point of reference and as a means of retrieval practise. 

KNOWLEDGE NOTES

Knowledge notes are an elaboration in the core knowledge found in knowledge organisers. 

Knowledge notes focus pupils’ working memory to the key question that will be asked at the end of the lesson.  It reduces cognitive load and avoids the split-attention effect.