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Evaluation Of A Design And Technology

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This essay critically evaluates a Design and Technology (DT) lesson taught in a year one classroom at a 3 form entry Infant School in a large village in West Sussex. I have chosen this subject as I feel DT has a crucial role to play within the primary classroom and I am passionate about the impact it can have on children’s learning when it is taught effectively. Specialising in art at university has helped strengthen my belief in the importance of teaching creatively and how teaching a broad and balanced range of subjects can allow children to access different strengths that they may never have known existed. Throughout both placement experiences I have observed a very limited amount of DT teaching within the classroom, often seemingly …show more content…

The lack of time to teach foundation subjects in school can leave teachers with inadequate experience of teaching DT (Sayers, 2002; OFSTEAD, 1999), the lesson taught was squeezed in at the end of term to ensure DT and Science had been taught but was planned as part of a cross-curricular learning journey to make the learning as meaningful as possible for the children (Barnes, 2015). The series of lessons involved the children using maths, science, English and DT skills. This lesson aimed to teach children how to design a vehicle and children were given design criteria they had to include in order to make it ‘functional and appealing’ (DfE, 2013). The lesson taught was part of a learning journey named ‘Where Did the Wheels Go?’ inspired by two texts with vehicle and journey contexts. Children had subsequent lessons following this DT lesson in which they would use their designs and make their vehicles, perform a science investigation to discover which vehicle moves the fastest and use maths to measure different parts of their vehicles, using previously taught skills in context to see that if they didn’t measure accurately their vehicle would not move. The learning objective ‘to design a vehicle’ was taken directly from the DT National Curriculum, children used this and a set of success criteria for their learning, this was clearly displayed in the

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