Our Learning / Design Technology
At St.Margaret Clitherow we aim to provide the children with a high-quality DT curriculum which allows them to exercise their creativity through designing and making. The children are taught to combine their designing and making skills with knowledge and understanding to design and make a product. Skills are taught progressively to ensure that all children can learn and practice to develop as they move through the school. Evaluation is an integral part of the design process and allows children to adapt and improve their product, this isa key skill which they need throughout their life. DT allows children to apply the knowledge and skills learned in other subjects, particularly Maths, Science and Art.
Children’s interests are captured through theme learning, ensuring that links are made in a cross curricular way, giving children motivation, and meaning for their learning. Children will learn basic cooking skills.
All teaching of DT follows the design, make, and evaluate cycle. Each stage is rooted in technical knowledge and vocabulary. The design process is rooted in real life, relevant contexts to give meaning to the children’s learning. While making, children are given choice and range of tools to select from. To evaluate, children should be able to evaluate their own products against a design criteria. Each of the stages are given equal weight. The programme we use to support our learning provides a clear skills and knowledge progression. This ensures that skills and knowledge are built on year by year and sequenced appropriately to maximise learning for all children. The children enjoy a DT lesson once a week during three half-terms a year, on rotation with their Art learning. This ensures our children have the time and space to study each topic in depth over a half-term.
The key skills the children learn are:
Sewing and textiles
Cooking and nutrition
Electrical and mechanical components
Using materials
Please scroll through the gallery below for a flavour of Design Technology learning at our school
DT can be found all around you at home and when out and about.
The key skills the children learn are:
Get cooking
Encourage your child to help prepare their packed lunch by making sandwiches or preparing the ingredients for the evening meal. Helping when cooking may even help fussier eaters to try different foods.
Talk about Design and Technology
When using tools around the house, such as a drill, whisk, knife, scissors, needle, or stapler, discuss what they are used for and why. Is it the best tool to use for the job? Why? Look at the shapes of different buildings when shopping or visiting. Discuss the different features such as the shape of the doors, drainpipes, escalators, and the look of the building. Why do you like it? Why not?
Provide Materials
Raid the recycling boxes, shed, or garden and provide cartons, fabric, paper, sticks, wood and so on and then allow your child to create. Encourage them to find different ways to join materials such as nailing or sewing.
Solving problems
Encourage your child to reuse, recycle or repurpose materials to solve problems. For example, your child wants a pencil pot to tidy their pens and pencils. Encourage them to design their own and create it using materials found around the house. Ask them how it has worked to encourage them to evaluate their products.
