Design Technology
In supporting the delivery of the statutory:
Design and Technology Primary National Curriculum
Design & technology overview
The design and technology projects are well sequenced to provide a coherent subject scheme that develops children’s designing, planning, making and evaluating skills.
Each project is based around a design and technology subject focus of structures, mechanisms, cooking and nutrition or textiles. The design and technology curriculum’s electronic systems and IT monitoring and control elements are explicitly taught in our science projects to ensure the links between the subjects are highlighted.
Where possible, meaningful links to other areas of the curriculum have been made. For example, the cooking and nutrition project Eat the Seasons is taught alongside the geography project Sow, Grow and Farm. All the projects follow a structure where children are introduced to key concepts and build up knowledge and skills over time, using a more comprehensive range of equipment and building, cutting, joining, finishing and cooking techniques as they progress through school.
All projects contain focused, practical tasks in the Develop stage to help children gain the knowledge and skills needed to complete their Innovate tasks independently.
Throughout Key Stages 1 and 2, children build up their knowledge and understanding of the iterative design process. They design, make, test and evaluate their products to match specific design criteria and ensure they fit their purpose. Throughout the projects, children are taught to work hygienically and safely.
Year 4 - Designed, made, and evaluated moving toys based on their learning from the Romans.
During the Summer term, Year 4 investigated shell structures and created a project from this.
Our project title was, "to create a keep safe box for an item special to us".
Once again, we designed our keep safe box, made it, evaluated it, and decided how to improve future projects using the key areas of DT. In addition, we linked our keep safe project closely with our geography climate change learning and used the Three R's, to support our project (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle). Therefore, we asked parents and carers for as much cardboard as possible and used these to help create strong and stiff structures.
Before starting our DT, we used our maths learning on 3D shapes and created nets to decide what shape keep safe box we wanted. Below are some 3D shapes that we created in the design phase...
Pupil Voice (evaluation):
"I really struggled to make a hexagonal prism with the strong card, so I changed my design to a cuboid shape, as this was much easier to do so I could work more on making it stronger and stiffer."
"I enjoyed creating different 3D shapes before we used the card. It gave me confidence on what my shell structure would look like once we did it"