Geography
Intent
At St Philip’s, we want our Geography Curriculum to inspire in children a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people, which will remain with them for the rest of our lives. We aim to allow children the opportunity to explore and explain the world in which we live and develop an understanding of the relationship between people and the environment. The Geography Curriculum is planned and sequenced towards cumulatively providing the necessary knowledge and skills for the pupils’ future to empower them to take their role as informed and active citizens in the 21st century. Its emphasis is not just on geographical knowledge but also skills and concepts.
Implementation
Geography is taught in half termly blocks and is taught over three half terms in each year group. Geography lessons are carefully planned to ensure skills, knowledge and understanding in geography progress through Year 1 to Year 6 are developed and applied. From Year 1 to Year 6 the scope of each unit increases, expanding from the pupils’ own environment to the wider world. Place studies start local and increase in scale to regional, national and global, allowing for revisiting, developing and challenging ideas and concepts. Similarly, consideration of the weather and seasons progresses to more in-depth study of the importance of climate and finally addresses protecting environments from global warming and combating climate change. Some units are essentially human geography, other physical geography, but most are holistic geography, considering human and physical geography together – the real, undifferentiated world of the pupil.
Impact
To assess geography, teachers measure the impact of the curriculum through a range of formative a summative assessment tools. Each unit has progressive assessment statements which are used to assess the achievements of each child. This tool allows the teacher the opportunity to review each child’s ‘geography journey’ through school and plan accordingly.
Subject leaders complete termly monitoring to assess the impact of the curriculum. This is done through a mixture of looking at children’s work in books, talking to pupils about their learning, observing lessons and carrying out learning walks through school. Our geography curriculum is then reviewed yearly to not only ensure that it is current and progressive, but that it also meets the needs of our children.
We want our children to show a real excitement and think about the world in which they live. We want children to ask questions, observe, use geographical vocabulary to describe, compare, give reasons and explain what they are learning about. The knowledge and skills that our children will acquire through geography, will equip them to solve the problems that will confront them in the future.
