Geography Lead: Sarah Weale

What is Geography?

Geographers seek to understand the distinctive features or characteristics of the places that make up the world.  When investigating the nature of places, thinking is developed by a number of big organising ideas and generalisations known as concepts.   These concepts form a unique framework of enquiry and shape the questions that geographers ask about places.  They can all be applied across the entire subject and every one is interconnected.  

Our Curriculum 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.  We have devised our geography curriculum to foster curiosity, develop a sense of place, and promote global awareness among our students. We believe that geography plays a crucial role in enabling children to understand the world in which they live, appreciate diverse cultures and environments, and make informed decisions about their impact on the planet.

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. This aim, together with the three ‘Big Ideas’ of geography, as described by the Geographical Association, pin together all of our units of work:

• Contextual world knowledge of locations, places and geographical features.
• Understanding of the conditions, processes and interactions that explain features, distribution patterns, and changes over time and space.
• Competence in geographical enquiry, and the application of skills in observing, collecting, analysing, evaluating and communicating geographical information.

Our Curriculum Implementation

We use ‘Connected History’ supplemented with learning from the Geographical Association as the starting points for our curriculum. There is a clear purpose and context to every enquiry and children acquire important subject knowledge and apply a growing repertoire of geographical and enquiry skills.

Each enquiry has a key question underpinned by several ancillary or sub-questions for the pupils to complete in turn as they progress through the investigation.

• We have a two year rolling programme in Key Stage 1, and a three year programme in 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, along with ensuring children have a growing locational knowledge.
• 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 place 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.

Our Curriculum Impact

By the time our children leave to move onto secondary school, we want them to take with them a good understanding of the three ‘Big Ideas’ in geography (see above). 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. These judgements are recorded on Insight.

Curriculum Drivers:

More in-depth documentation is available on request for our geography curriculum.