At St Peter’s Primary Academy, our intent is to produce a first-class Geography curriculum for all our children which inspires children’s curiosity and interest to explore the world that we live in, whilst igniting a love of learning.
Geography is by nature an investigative subject, which develops an understanding of concepts, knowledge and skills. The geography lessons at St Peters will encompass this and seek to inspire children’s curiosity of the world and its people, it will provoke thought about both natural and human environments, together with ensuring children have a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human features.
The lessons will be underpinned with a focus on developing geographical skills and ensuring sound progression of knowledge and a sequenced understanding of key concepts. As teachers we aspire to ensure that the skills taught are transferable throughout their time at St Peter’s and also into their further education. Our core aims are:
St Peter’s strongly believe that the discipline of geography is particularly well positioned to address the teaching of ethics. Geography deals with many “inherently controversial subjects, from population control to environmental change” (Vujakovic & Bullard, 2001: 276), providing a significant range of contemporary topics in which to engage in rich ethical discussion. Situated in a rural location with 91% of the local community White British, as a school, we are always incredibly mindful of the need to equip our children with a global perspective and ensure they have an appreciation of the diversity of the wider world.
Each topic with Geography will have an ethical discussion as part of its teaching sequence. Ethics within our Geography curriculum will focus upon:
Our overarching aim for Geography at St Peter’s is for all children to develop a greater understanding and knowledge of the world, as well as their place in it and to promote inquisitive and active geographers. Our curriculum is designed in such a way that, over the course of study, teaching is designed to help learners to remember in the long term the content they have been taught and to integrate new knowledge into larger concepts.
To develop well rounded and successful geographers we take our guidance from The National Curriculum and we expose our children to planned and differentiated lessons which are taught with a clear geographical objective engendered by an enquiry-based gateway question. As part of our topics we incorporate high quality stimulus texts so as to engage the children yet further and highlight the importance of reading in the wider curriculum.
Thanks to carefully planned progression documents we can ensure that during our dedicated afternoon lessons, that are taught in topics so that children can achieve depth in their learning, we can ensure continuity and progression across the key stages. We recognise Geography as an investigation into the world with a focus on skills and deepening knowledge and understanding. The core components of our curriculum are as follows:
To ensure depth within our enquiry-based geography curriculum we believe there are essential components within our sequence of learning to ensure our children become passionate and successful geographers.
We want children to be inquisitive geographers therefore our lessons will begin by asking questions that will encourage discussion and deeper thinking about the world, which then leads to the next step within our teaching sequence. As such, all lessons begin with an enquiry-based gateway questions e.g. Why can’t a meerkat live in the North Pole? As well as this enquiry question, learning objectives are always shared with children at the start of the lesson and great care is taken to ensure these objectives are age appropriate and accessible for all children.
The structure of each lesson will be as follows:
Starter – All lessons will begin by recapping prior knowledge and discussing Tier 3 vocabulary in detail. Following this will be the Introduction of the key enquiry question for the lesson.
Main body of lesson- Each lesson will begin with a focus on location. Following this, each lesson will include activities which incorporate fundamental geographical skills whilst ensuring deep understanding of geographical subject knowledge.
Plenary - reflection is a core component of teaching at St Peter’s and gives all children the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding and reflect on the learning process. Children add cumulatively to a knowledge organiser to demonstrate their ever growing subject knowledge.
Impact:
To measure the impact of this approach we will ensure that the emphasis is placed on analytical thinking and questioning which help children gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of the world both locally and globally and their place within it due to our enquiry-based gateway question.
We introduce blank mind maps to the children at the beginning of each topic, which gives children the opportunity to record what they have learnt during the twice weekly session. This is then used as a comparative to their starting points at the end of every topic. In addition to this we will pupil conference with children on a regular basis to assess their understanding, retention of facts and opinions towards geography.