"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
Steve Jobs
What does DT look like at Uplands?
At Uplands Primary School we aim to engage, inspire and challenge all pupils, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to plan, create and evaluate their own products as well as harnessing an appreciation for design and technology in the wider world. We aim to teach the relevant vocabulary, knowledge and skills to enable them to create products in a real-world context involving food and nutrition, structures, textiles, mechanisms and electrical systems. Our aim is to ensure that Design and Technology is creative and practical to provide children with the chance to problem solve and develop their own ideas individually and as part of a team.
The curriculum is structured in a way that allows for children to make links between current and previous learning. Teachers make comparisons between DT units previously taught, developing children’s deep repertoire of knowledge, understanding and skills in order to design and make high-quality prototypes and products for a wide range of users. All classes start their lessons with a retrieval practice activity focusing on the key knowledge and key vocabulary about their current unit or a previous unit with the aim to support the children to know more, remember more and understand more. We make links in our DT lessons to our five Big Ideas that appear throughout all subjects in our curriculum: environment, similarities and differences, diversity, relationships and changes.
Enrichment Opportunities
We enrich our curriculum through relevant trips, visitors to the school and cross-curricular DT work. In the past, these have included:
DT Outcomes
At Uplands, we communicate our learning through a variety of ways. In DT, these can include annotated designs, exploded diagrams, computer aided designs, pattern pieces, prototypes and evaluations. Each DT unit ends with a product being made. These include:
Cooking and nutrition: A healthy snack item, chapatti bread, a Mexican salsa, a healthy salad, pizza.
Structures: A bridge, a Tudor house, a bird feeder, a greenhouse.
Mechanisms: Pop-up cards, shadow puppets (with levers), a Viking ship (using cams), a catapult, a pneumatic moving toy, a car.
Electrical systems: A torch, a programmable moon buggy.
Textiles: A drawstring purse, a tote bag, a superhero cape.
Class teachers formatively assess the children’s understanding of the key knowledge and practical skills taught throughout their lessons. They also record an overall understanding of key areas at the end of each unit to enable the subject leader and future teachers to have a picture of each child’s learning journey across their time from Reception to Year 6.
DT In Action
Our DT Curriculum
We have carefully mapped out our curriculum to ensure that we build on the skills, knowledge and vocabulary learnt in each unit. We have picked out the small steps of knowledge from each unit that is needed to be able to complete the end of unit outcome. These are the key points of learning that we want each child to retain from each unit of work.