Geography
From the moment our smallest children come through the doors in reception, they are immersed in experiences that:
- Develop a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people.
- Help them to understand their place in the world locally, nationally and globally.
- Informs, challenges and conceptually shapes their perception and understanding of the world around them.
- Equips them with the geographical skills to think like a geographer.
Our curriculum is guided by the following academic fingerprint:
Children will:
- Have secure contextual knowledge of local, national and globally significant places and be able to identify and locate a range of continents, countries and important cities.
- Have a secure understanding of a range of human and physical geographical characteristics and how these change over time.
- Be competent in the geographical skills needed to: collect, analyse and communicate a range of data gathered through experiences of fieldwork.
- Have secure knowledge of reading, understanding and creating/drawing maps. They will gain experience of using atlases, globes and aerial photographs.
- Have competent skills to communicate geographical information in a variety of ways, including through maps, numerical and quantitative skills and writing at length.
How geography is taught:
- The teaching of geography at Knayton is based on the aims and purposes outlined in the National Curriculum and has fidelity to the academic discipline of geographical learning.
- In EYFS, Geography is taught through a play-based curriculum that encourages children to develop the key concept of place. Children may develop their fine-motor skills through drawing plans and sketch maps. During this, explicit geographical vocabulary will be introduced and modelled to the children, e.g., close to, above, besides
- Geography in Y1-6 is taught through units each term, as a discrete subject (Autumn 1, Spring 1 and Summer 1).
- In order to help children to know more and remember more, children will revisit prior learning every lesson, through a low-stakes mini quiz. This is to firstly ensure that previously learned material is not forgotten and secondly to ensure that, through frequent revisiting of a range of material, children are able to form ever more well-connected networks of ideas.
- High quality core texts are used to enhance teaching. Recommended reads have been carefully considered for each year group and use the highest quality texts.
- There are regular, purposeful and meaningful opportunities for children to learn outdoors, undertake fieldwork and apply their skills as geographers.
Our geography curriculum
- Learning starts in EYFS, where children acquire a wide range of vocabulary and develop a sense of place. They will build on this through the rest of their schooling.
- Content has been sequenced to extend and expand children’s geography experiences. We use children’s previous learning and build on this. This allows them to build strong schemas that they can then apply to wider contexts.
- Our geography curriculum has our 3 values of compassion, courage and respect woven throughout.
- In order to achieve all of this, we use a curriculum model that has been carefully considered to state the key geography knowledge that children need to learn and when they need to learn it
- National Curriculum expectations were used as the basis and these were further built on by identifying additional knowledge (substantive knowledge), skills (disciplinary knowledge) and vocabulary.
Please click here to view our geography curriculum.
Here's what our children say:
"Geography is the best! We get to learn about different countries and places that we'd never normally know about."
"We go on really fun trips, like the time we went to the beach to do a litter pick and got interviewed by Sky News!"
"We learn lots about where we live."
