How to plan using the Cornerstones Curriculum (England)
Please note: this guidance is taken from the Maestro Helpcentre for England, but may provide some context and detail for schools in Wales who are intending to use some of the knowledge-rich projects (KRPs) within their own bespoke curriculum.
In recent years, cognitive science has become hugely influential in designing and implementing the primary curriculum. This emerging evidence has provided us here at Cornerstones with a new and exciting way of thinking about how we design our curriculum so that we can help children to know and do more.
As a result, we have now developed an evidence-informed curriculum called the Cornerstones Curriculum. This curriculum takes the most robust aspects of cognitive research and applies them in intelligent and practical ways. Not only will this save you time, but it will also ensure your curriculum is completely up to date with the latest cognitive theory.
While we have incorporated many aspects of current research into the Cornerstones Curriculum, we remain a strong advocate of the power of professional knowledge. The flexibility of the Cornerstones Curriculum and Curriculum Maestro’s impressive functionality means that you can use, adapt and tailor the curriculum to meet your school’s specific needs and aims.
To learn more about the cognitive science in the Cornerstones Curriculum, please read our Evidence-informed learning booklet, available on our main website.
Where to start
When planning the Cornerstones Curriculum, it is useful to begin with an overview of each subject to help you understand the main ideas of what is needed to be taught. It may be worth starting with our overview documents, located in the Library. This can then help you plan out the finer details, make connections between other subjects and understand how this may sequence into prior or future learning. Within Curriculum Maestro, there are many tools that highlight these connections across the projects, including CurriculumPRO.
We would advise reading through all the projects you are planning to teach for a term to help you understand the lesson sequence and connections between the projects. You can then look at the coverage of objectives in specific lessons, work out how the projects fit into your timetable and think about whether you need to ‘hide’ any lessons that you do not plan to teach. It is important to note here that we would advise teaching all the lessons in a project, as removing any would impact the narrative of the project. However, we also recognise that other factors can influence curriculum planning, which means it is not always possible to fit everything in, so understanding the sequence and coverage of lessons can help you make a more informed choice.
Using the timetable
Using the timetable can help you plan the lessons from the projects and map them out around your other subjects or events that may occur throughout your week. How you plan the lessons within your timetable will be different to how another school does this. For example, you may decide to do two geography lessons a week, while another school delivers all the geography lessons within a two-week period. Alternatively, you may decide to have an arts week, where you teach the lessons from an art project over the course of a week, at the end of teaching one of the KRPs. This flexibility works well, as long as everything remains in the correct sequence as set out in the curriculum model. For more information on how to use the timetable, please see Planning using the timetable.
You may also wish to stagger elements of the different projects, such as the Memorable Experiences and Innovate stages, as these tend to be longer sessions and may be spread over the course of a week. Below is a sample of a plan for Year 1, using the Cornerstones Curriculum for the spring term, based on a 12-week period. Where possible, we recommend 6.5 hours of Cornerstones lessons per week, which includes using 1 literacy lesson (a cross-curricular opportunity). This leaves opportunities to teach other subjects, such as English, maths, etc.
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