The Prep School at Manor House School, Bookham, offers a cross-curricular approach to help teach the curriculum. This means integrating content and skills from multiple subjects like Science, History, English and Design and Technology into a unit of work or a theme. This allows pupils to see connections between different disciplines and learn more holistically through a unified topic, rather than studying each subject in isolation. Essentially, it encourages pupils to think critically and apply knowledge across different areas to better understand the real world.
Reception is taught through a topic based cross-curricular theme each Half Term. For example, during the first half of the Spring Term, the topic was 'Cold As Ice' and children looked at the story of the Snow Queen. In that week in Literacy, the children wrote character descriptions of the Snow Queen. In Expressive Arts and Design (EAD), the children dressed up as the Snow Queen, Kit and Gerda and acted out the story. In Understanding of The World (UTW), the children looked at ice and how it thawed to water while painting it to see how the colours changed when they were mixed. In PSHE, they talked about the friendship of Kit and Gerda and how she worked so hard to help her friend and what it means to be a good friend.
In Year 2, pupils have been reading, ‘The Hodgeheg’ a book by Dick King Smith for English and have made hedgehog houses out of shoe boxes in Design Technology and also clay hedgehogs in Art to go inside. This also linked to their Science work, where they were looking at different habitats and they specifically looked at habitats for hedgehogs.
In Year 3, all of the English, Humanities, Art and Design Technology link together to make the children's learning meaningful and purposeful. While learning about The Stone Age in humanities, the children read the book The Stone Age Boy in English. They created their own adventure stories about finding themselves in the Stone Age and meeting a Stone Age family. Then in Art, the children created Stone Age jewellery, which is what the Stone Age family in their stories had taught them how to make. This then finished with the children taking part in a Stone Age experience day, where they spent their time living with a 'real' Stone Age family. They learnt Stone Age skills and cooked fish on an open fire.
Whilst studying both Guildford and Portsmouth in Year 4 and comparing these two locations, thinking of similarities and differences, the girls used VCOP and fronted adverbials to create some excellent sentence work. They also made Guildford/Portsmouth 3D dioramas out of card, these were able to show school through Guildford to Portsmouth using cutting skills and cross over perspective in Art. The Mary Rose research project and resultant A3 linked to our trip to Portsmouth and visit to The Mary Rose.
Year 5 have studied the Victorians and have read, ‘Runaway Girls’ by Jaqueline Wilson. They have used this as a basis for finding out and comparing the lives of the rich and poor as well as writing a letter to persuade an unjust decision in the eyes of a child. In Design Technology, they created hand stitched aprons from old pillowcases linking the idea that clothes were handmade and had to be repaired rather than replaced which is what happens in society today.
Manor House School, Bookham is a selective Independent School in Surrey. Its Lower Prep Department is co-educational, moving to a School for girls in the Upper Prep School (Year 3 to Year 6) and Senior School (Year 7 to Year 11). Manor House School is part of the Effingham School Trust, with St Teresa's School and Cranmore School, with all located just a few miles apart. Girls leaving Manor House School after GCSE's have a guaranteed place at The Effingham Sixth Form.