Geography

Intent

We want Geography to inspire excitement, creativity and critical thinking about our world, and allow children to better understand their place in it by seeing the world through the eyes of young geographers. This, together with the our vision and curriculum drivers, shaped the decisions we made in creating a curriculum that is engaging and challenging, and which will develop children’s understanding of our world, and their responsibilities towards it.

Impact

The evaluation of learning takes place in a number of ways:

Assessment takes place throughout each lesson, using formative strategies such as asking challenging, in-depth questions; feedback through marking and discussion; opportunities for children to respond to this and improve their work; and self-assessment and peer assessment.
Teachers frequently check children’s learning, for example through knowledge and word quizzes.
Key learning and understanding for each unit is identified, and forms the basis of summative assessment at the end of each term.

Implementation

After much research, we chose to use ‘Primary Connected Geography’, which we felt was best placed to support the delivery of our Intent, and also provided high quality professional development for teachers.

We have a two year rolling programme in Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2.
Learning is delivered through asking big questions about topics, places, themes and issues.
Developing understanding of the interaction between human beings with their environments at personal, local, regional, national and global scales is a core part of every enquiry.
Each enquiry lists the key subject specific vocabulary to be learned, although these lists are not exhaustive. Time is devoted to the development of vocabulary as well as ensuring that vocabulary already mastered is used.
Investigations are placed based and use a range of examples at different scales of locations around the world, in line with National Curriculum requirements, to illustrate key geographical concepts.
Links are made with prior learning, and when appropriate, with other subjects.
The children’s ability to apply skills, for example, naming, locating, recognising, describing, making judgements, comparing and contrasting, evaluating, hypothesising and concluding is developed systematically.