Quest Learning –
As a school we endeavour to constantly develop and improve our curriculum. The recent pandemic has made us even more aware of the need to do this so that our curriculum is meeting the needs of our learners in any given moment. We feel that learning through a quest will support the return to school for our children.
What is Quest?
Quest is a way of delivering our curriculum by engaging and involving our learners often through an imagined world. The children are fully immersed in the quest making decisions within learning activities; determining the pathways taken and working in a collaborative way. They undertake roles within the narrative as it unfolds. The process is built upon a comprehensive range of skills and knowledge that the children will acquire – these are taken from the National Curriculum. It is a cross curricular way of learning.
Quest is a curriculum offer at Norbury Hall that gives learners the opportunity to work through a narrative linked to the key aspects of learning across all subjects for each half term.
Learners should work together in role to solve problems, follow clues, answer questions, hypothesise, experiment, explore and discover using key skills and pre- determined knowledge to find out more.
At Norbury Hall we believe learning should be experiential, immersive and built from enquiry. By combining the creativity of our teachers with the imaginations of our learners, we aim to offer learning that sticks, that builds from experiences and gives our children a toolkit for life long learning.
Learning at Norbury Hall should be Irresistible…
Through the Quest experience our learners should be guided through our key principles for learning:
• Our children imagine because their hearts and minds are stimulated
• Our children negotiate and navigate through a range of possibilities
• Our children use prior experiences to select the best route to succeed
• Our children consider presentation from the start of any task and persevere to make it perfect
• Our children immerse themselves in every activity
• Our children reflect on each task to refine their application each time
• Our children are given time to evaluate
By offering the Quest experience our teaching team should
• Plan, resource and present a question, problem or challenge through a carefully constructed narrative
• Allow the freedom for learners to interpret the narrative and take the learning in their own direction
• Ensure the learning skills and knowledge show progression and are age appropriate
• Regularly assess, give feedback and direction to the learners throughout the Quest experience
• Promote reading for pleasure through a text or texts linked to the Quest theme
• Use curriculum plans in all curriculum areas as starting points for designing Quest
• Record the journey of a Quest through coffee table or floor books, learning walls and theme books.
The quest for this term is entitled ‘Norbury Explorers’
It is designed to develop geographical skills but will incorporate other curriculum areas such as art and music and will be supported by a wealth of texts including poetry, fiction and non- fiction pieces.
Our children will explore a variety of locations and will make comparisons as they map their learning. They will explore our Norbury pathways across all subjects to build a knowledge of wher we and others live around the world.
Our overviews will be compiled with the children in the coming weeks and will shortly be posted on our class pages.