We are Designers

Design and Technology

Mrs Sarah Cresswell

At Hasland Infant School we will teach children to understand how products are designed and made.

Our Design and Technology curriculum is designed to keep up with and reflect an ever changing world. It is our intention to enable the children to move with these changes and be the people that influence change in the future.

Through design and technology our children acquire a broad range of subject knowledge. They draw on disciplines such as mathematics, science, food and nutrition, engineering, computing and art as part of the Design and Technology curriculum.

Design and Technology enables the children’s ideas to come to life. As designers they explore new techniques. They problem solve. They evaluate to improve their own and other people’s ideas and products. They learn to take risks. They experience trial and error and learn from making mistakes. Ultimately our children will become resourceful, innovative, enterprising and capable citizens.

Our Design and Technology curriculum will enable our children to:

Draw on their own and other people's experiences to generate ideas.
Develop their design ideas through discussion, observation, drawing and modelling.
Identify a target audience for what they intend to design and make based on a design criteria.
Make templates and mock ups of their ideas in card and paper or using ICT.
Select, name and use tools and materials safely.
Evaluate their work against their design criteria.

Click on the link below to view documents related to Design and Technology. These include The Design and Technology Policy, Progression of Design and Technology Knowledge and a Key Knowledge Grid.

Design and Technology

Our Autumn Term topic here at Hasland Infant School is Heroes and Villains.

Our children in EYFS received a recipe from Zog for some delicious healthy oat biscuits. The children thought about who their heroes were and made biscuits for them! The children discussed and understood the importance of washing their hands before they handled the food. They discussed why it is so important to follow a sequence when following a recipe and preparing food, they used simple technique and utensils and they used weighing scales to measure the ingredients. The children had lots of fun and were able to tell us what they liked about their finished biscuits.

Our Year 1 children designed, made and evaluated houses for the Big Bad Wolf for their topic of Heroes and Villains. They looked at different homes in the local environment and around the world. They discussed the main features such as the doors, windows, roofs and walls. They then experimented with joining 2D and 3D materials using glue and tape and started to explore how to make doors and windows by making a hinge. The children had lots of opportunity to explore with different materials and tools to find out for themselves which ones will work the best for a purpose.

The children did a fantastic job of designing, making and evaluating their houses.

Our Year 2 children have done some great DT during the Autumn term. We have been learning about space and we have concentrated on the 'heroes' related to this topic. As part of this topic we had a visitor from an alien called Zig. Unfortunately Zig was quite lonely and wanted some new friends. We thought we could do a fantastic job of designing, making and evaluating some alien friends for him! The children thought about how their puppets would work and they drew some detailed designs thinking about what materials, tools and techniques they would use. They then started making their puppets and knew that it was ok to change their ideas if something wasn't working as they initially thought. They also engaged in lots of discussions with their peers and with the adults in the class about how they could make their puppets better and used these skills to evaluate them. They did a fantastic job and Zig was extremely happy when he met his new friends!