Design & Technology

​The most certain way to succeed is to try just one more time.'  Thomas A Edison 

​​'The important thing is to never stop questioning.'  Albert Einsteinen

‘Treasure your curiosity and nurture your imagination.  Have confidence in yourself.’  Shirley Anne Jackson

​

'Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.'  James Dyson

What does DT look like at St Bernadette’s?

At the heart of our DT curriculum are three key foci: user, purpose and product.  Our DT curriculum provides the children with a real-life context for designing and making products with a purpose.  At St Bernadette’s, we encourage the children to aim high and engage with the wider world.  Through our DT curriculum, children should be inspired by engineers, designers, chefs and architects to enable them to design and make a range of structures, mechanisms, textiles, electrical systems and food products with real-life purposes and for given users.  They will develop skills, knowledge and understanding of designing and making functional products.  They will learn to use a range of tools with confidence and view evaluation as a way to adapt and improve their product.  Our curriculum encourages children’s creativity and innovation through engaging with important issues by exploring the designed and made world in which we all live and work.

Design and Technology Documents

Bug Hotels

Year 5 investigated, designed and made a range of bug hotels.   Why build a bug hotel? Bug hotels benefit lots of different types of minibeast and insects such as ladybirds, bees, spiders and woodlice. Minibeasts can then use your bug hotel as a safe space to shelter, lay their eggs, raise their young, and seek refuge from predators.

Year 4 Textiles

User: a person of our choice from home

Purpose: a Christmas gift

Product: a money container

We began the unit by examining existing money containers in order to analyse and understand how products are made.  We created our design criteria.  Next, we learnt how to thread a needle, tie a knot, sew the back stitch or over stitch and make a button loop for a button.  We recorded our plans by drawing using annotated sketches and preparing pattern pieces as templates for our designs.  At each stage of the making process, we had to select from our bank of techniques.  During our evaluations, we identified the strengths and weaknesses of our design ideas in relation to the purpose and our user.  We carefully wrapped our finished product in the beautiful wrapping paper made by Year 5 – just in time for Christmas.

Year 4- Art & DT - Light Up Signs

We investigated a range of light up signs and explored their purposes.  We applied our knowledge of circuits from our science lessons to create our own light up signs for different areas in school – from the entrance to prayer areas and to the library. 

Year 4 - Art & DT - Light Up Signs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Year 5 - Construction

Year 3 - DT: Baking

Year 3 spent the last few weeks looking at food in DT. We thoroughly enjoyed our lessons researching the different qualities of biscuits (yum!). We then decided to make a sweet treat for a loved one for Christmas. In order to design a treat they would like, we asked them about their favourite colour, shape and flavour (among other things) and designed our treat based on their answers. We had such fun baking and decorating our biscuits. We hope you enjoyed them!