St Joseph's Catholic Primary, Brighton

At St. Joseph's, we pride ourselves in providing opportunities for all students to investigate, design, make and evaluate various products throughout the school year. 

Our design and technology curriculum encourages children to combine skills, knowledge, concepts and values to enable them to tackle real problems which in turn can improve critical analysis, problem solving, and practical capability and evaluation skills.

We aim to provide the children with numerous opportunities to gain skills and develop their understanding in relation to the expectations outlined in the National Curriculum.

Throughout the years, children will focus on developing skills in the following aspects:

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Design and Technology Week

The final week of every half term at St Josephs' is 'DT Week' in which the children are immersed in their project and begin a new learning journey each time to develop a new skill. 

The children are actively involved in all parts of the design process as mentioned above and complete the week with not only new lifelong skills, but with a individualized item or product to either take home or eat and enjoy at school.

Please see below for some pictures from our latest DT weeks.

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INTENT:

To engage, inspire and challenge children, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to solve problems, innovate and invent products. They do this in a process that allows them to develop new practical skills and effectively use a range of technology to create high-quality outcomes.

IMPLEMENTATION:

All lessons are planned using skill progressions so that each year children build upon previous learning. We cover a range of product design areas – including food mechanisms, electrical systems, structures and textiles. We design for a purpose, using research to examine existing products. We encourage the children to take risks in their designs, we let their choices and innovation lead the design process. We use the scheme ‘Projects on a Page’ which allows us to stretch the children’s imaginations whilst remaining true to the National Curriculum aims and objectives.

IMPACT:

Children will develop their skills, creative thinking and knowledge during their time at St Joseph’s. Our Design and Technology curriculum develops the practical skills of our children, preparing them for later life. Above all, we hope that our Design and Technology lessons broaden our children’s understanding of how design affects our world and inspire them to use these skills in their own lives.

Please click here to access the latest Design and Technology National Curriculum page for more information. 

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Changes to the D.T. Curriculum include:

-More emphasis on creating 'innovative' products in KS2

-Two strands: Designing and Making and Cooking and Nutrition

-Teaching the importance of making on-going changes and improvements during making stages

-Looking into seasonality of ingredients and how they are grown, caught or reared

-The introduction of computing an coding of products in KS2

-Researching key events and individuals in KS2

Design and Technology Week (2) 

Monday 12th December  - Friday 16th December 2022

This week our projects ranged from a bird house feeder in Reception, to making some delicious food in Years 2, 3 and 5 through to some amazing freestanding structures from Year 1 and 6, with the latter using a pully mechanism!

Here are a selection of pictures: 

Design and Technology Week

Monday 17th October  - Wednesday 19th October 2022

Children across the school worked on their own unique projects as part of our whole school approach and dedication to improving our children's creative and critical thinking. The children began the week by researching existing products before they designed, made and evaluated their own.

Some of the exceptional products the children made throughout the school included: split pin animals, moving structures, fabric flowers, boxes of treasures. 

Here are a selection of pictures: