Why we teach computing

At St. Anne’s Infants’ school, we believe Computing to be integral to our everyday lives.

We aim to provide our children with the technical knowledge and understanding to thrive in an ever-changing technological world, whilst giving them high quality, enjoyable and memorable learning experiences.  We recognise the power that digital literacy has to develop our children’s understanding of our world and its amazing diversity.   By upskilling children with online competency, they have the digital tools to learn about, respect and understand different cultures and beliefs. We teach them the knowledge and skills that we believe will enable our next generation of adventurous, computer scientists to make sense of and contribute to the current and future world they live in.

The knowledge, skills and understanding children develop

Children’s knowledge, understanding and transferable skills are broadened through our bespoke computing curriculum. Collaborative and independent practical exploration develops children’s logical reasoning to competently use programming to identify, follow, create, decode and debug algorithms. Purposeful use of technology equips the children with computational thinking and resilience in order to create, organise, edit, store and retrieve digital content through programmes such as PowerPoint and Word and applications such as stop animation and photography tools. Children’s oracy and communication is key within a child’s development and our language rich computing experiences ensure children acquire the technical vocabulary and comprehension in order to speak confidently to a range of audiences. 

The learning experience

Our practical computing curriculum ensures a clear progression of skills, understanding and knowledge from Nursery through to Year 2. From the moment our children join us, they are immersed in exciting hands on technological experiences that ignite their curiosity, awe and wonder and develop their methodical approach to problem solving. Play based learning enables our early years children to develop transferable skills through the exploration of a vast range of technology. In Key Stage 1 children’s knowledge and skills are deepened, enhanced and integrated within our enquiry led curriculum, for example; stories are brought to life through animation in English, internet research tells us about the past in history, graphs are created and analysed in Mathematics and time lapse photographs enrich science experiments. Learning from people who use technology in their everyday lives inspire our children to develop their growth mindset and aspire to be the next animator, blogger, programmer, web designer of the future!

We teach according to the Teach Computing curriculum which follows the following key areas:

- Creating media

- Data and information

- Computing systems

- Impact of technology

- Algorithms and programming

- Safety and Security.

We also have an full E-Safety Curriculum; please see details on the Safeguarding section.