Design and Technology
From the moment our smallest children come through the doors in reception, they are immersed in experiences that:
- Develop their skills and understanding of techniques, and to put them into real life contexts.
- Provide a strong understanding of the importance of following instructions to be safe.
- Make links when developing DT skills, to real life, to understand the importance and relevance of these life skills.
- Help them to see the bigger picture that links DT to science, technology, food, engineering, architecture, maths through teachers exploring and exploiting cross curricular links.
- Supports them to understand the uses and implications of design and food technology, today and in the future.
- Nurtures independence and encourage children to ask questions about the world they live in.
Our curriculum is guided by the following academic fingerprint:
- 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
How Design Technology is taught:
- The teaching of Design and Technology at Knayton is based on the aims and purposes outlined in the National Curriculum and has fidelity to the Kapow Curriculum.
- In EYFS, DT is taught through a play-based curriculum that encourages children to develop their practical skills and to gain a knowledge of Design Technology in everyday life. Children may develop their fine-motor skills through drawing plans and building in the craft area, for example, using junk modelling.. During this, explicit vocabulary will be introduced and modelled to the children, e.g., construct, mould, shape, attach etc.
- Design Technology in Y1-6 is taught through units throughout the year, as a discrete subject.
- In order to help children to know more and remember more, children will revisit prior learning every lesson, through a low-stakes mini quiz. This is to firstly ensure that previously learned material is not forgotten and secondly to ensure that, through frequent revisiting of a range of material, children are able to form ever more well-connected networks of ideas.
- High quality core texts are used to enhance teaching. Recommended reads have been carefully considered for each year group and use the highest quality texts.
Our Design Technology curriculum:
- Learning starts in EYFS, where children acquire a wide range of vocabulary and develop practical skills or designing and making. They will build on this through the rest of their schooling.
- We use children’s previous learning and build on this. This allows them to build strong schemas that they can then apply to wider contexts.
- Our Design Technology curriculum has our 3 values of compassion, courage and respect woven throughout.
- In order to achieve all of this, we use a curriculum model that has been carefully considered to state the key DT knowledge that children need to learn and when they need to learn it
- National Curriculum expectations were used as the basis and these were further built on by identifying additional knowledge (substantive knowledge), skills (disciplinary knowledge) and vocabulary.
Please click here to view our design & technology curriculum
Here's what our children say:
"When we do D&T, it makes me think I might want to be an architect."
"I love D&T because we get to make things, evaluate them and then make them even better"
"We get to use real things like wood, saws, drills and screws. We make things that we can take home and actually use!"
