Intent

At Henbury View First School, we have designed our Geography curriculum with the intent that it will inspire our children with a curiosity, fascination and appreciation of the world around them. It will equip them with a diverse knowledge and understanding of people, places, natural, human and physical geography. The curriculum progression will expand outwards from the immediate locality to the global but with a comparison and contrast to the touchstone of the local at each step. The curriculum will engage our children and facilitate and inspire them to become inquisitive, resilient, independent, challenging thinkers and active global citizens with the confidence to use, and build on, their cultural capital, learning and experiences - both inside and outside of the classroom. Through our teaching, we intend to provoke thought, questions and to encourage children to discover answers to their own questions through exploration and research to enable them to gain a greater understanding and knowledge of the world and their place in it.

Implementation

Geography at Henbury View is taught in blocks throughout the year, so that children can achieve depth in their learning. Each unit of work has identified the key knowledge and skills that children need to know, and consideration has been given to ensure progression across units throughout each year group and across the school. At the beginning of each unit, children can convey what they know already as well as what they would like to find out. This informs the programme of study and ensures that lessons are relevant and take account of children’s different starting points. The local area is fully utilised to achieve the desired outcomes, with extensive opportunities for learning outside the classroom embedded in practice.

The curriculum progression ensures children gain both substantive and disciplinary knowledge that helps them to form a greater understanding of the world around them. At Henbury, we have identified key substantive content threads as locational knowledge, place knowledge, environmental, physical and human geography and geographical skills and fieldwork. Our disciplinary knowledge is mapped to ensure children consider where geographical knowledge originates, and how they can learn the practices of geographers. Units of work at sequenced effectively, drawing upon strong links with other subjects across the curriculum when appropriate to help children make links between content. Curriculum content is clearly broken down into component parts and is drawn from a breadth of concepts to give children the knowledge they need to appreciate the wider subject. Our curriculum focuses heavily on place, right from the EYFS, helping children to recognise ‘where’s where’, in turn helping them build their own identity and sense of place in the world. Enquiry-based learning in geography is used to support the development of pupils’ disciplinary knowledge. Through careful content selection and teacher guidance, we help children to ask topical and relevant geographical questions, to critique sources and reflect on what they have learned, as well as the methods they have used.

Key Threads

At Henbury View, we have key threads that run through and across year groups. These will continually be revisited and explored across the academic journey of a child at Henbury. Each thread is underpinned by key vocabulary and knowledge that will be explicitly taught in Geography. The key threads are: