Intent: This is what we want for your child.
At Barley Fields Primary our Geography curriculum is designed to foster children’s curiosity and deepen their understanding and appreciation of the world both in their immediate environment (the school), locally and further afield. Children will have opportunities to explore both the physical and human features of the earth and develop their locational knowledge and understanding.
Our intention is to empower children to become informed global citizens by nurturing the skills they need to face and improve the rapidly changing environment around them, to recognise the importance of sustainability and care for the planet. We ensure through fieldwork, that children use their geographical skills to investigate a range of places – both in Britain and abroad – to help develop their knowledge and understanding of our world. We are committed to providing children with opportunities to investigate and make enquiries about our local area of Teesside so that they can develop of real sense of who they are, their heritage and what makes our local area unique and special.
Implementation: This is what it will look like in the classroom.
Our children follow a carefully structured, ambitious and engaging curriculum designed to ensure children know more, remember more and can do more as they progress through our school. The curriculum is built around four strands.
- Geographical Skills and Fieldwork
- Place Knowledge
- Locational Knowledge
- Human and Physical Geography
Our geography curriculum begins in Early Years with Understanding the World and The Natural World when children explore their locality, begin to talk about places they have visited and explore and observe similarities and differences within their immediate environment. In KS1 and 2 we extend this learning with opportunities to explore their locality and the wider world, its people and its features.
The Geography curriculum has been designed using content from the national curriculum and includes themes selected to inspire, challenge and engage children. It is taught in blocks to ensure comprehensive coverage and meaningful engagement for children. Detailed schemes of learning support teaching, ensure continuity and carefully plan for progression and depth. These plans are underpinned with an appropriate teaching pedagogy for effective quality first teaching allowing for our school-wide best practice of adaptive teaching. Hands on experiences, field trips, investigations and enquiries are integral to our approach and learning is enhanced through a variety of resources available, including digi-maps, Google Earth, globes, floor maps, Enrich orienteering and the use of iPads.
We are proud to offer a curriculum informed by the latest research and which undergoes regular reviews and updates to ensure its relevance and effectiveness.
Our children are taught to understand the core skills needed to work effectively as a Geographer with the use of our bespoke curriculum character – Gemma the Geographer. This character is used regularly to demonstrate the end points for each key stage, in an accessible, child-friendly way. This character is regularly used to encourage children to reflect on the key skills and concept areas of geography.
Impact: This is what it will mean for our children.
We are proud that the impact of our geography curriculum helps our children have a good understanding of the world in which they live and its key features.
Our Geography curriculum and our teaching and learning pedagogy leads to children who:
- have an excellent knowledge of where places are and what they are like.
- understand the ways in which places are interdependent and interconnected
- understand how human and physical environments are interrelated.
- have an extensive base of geographical knowledge and vocabulary.
- have an ability to reach conclusions and develop reasoned arguments to explain findings.
- frequently engage in fieldwork and other geographical techniques.
- have a passion for and commitment to the subject, and a real sense of curiosity to find out about the world and the people who live there.
- have the ability to express well-balanced opinions, rooted in good knowledge and understanding about current and contemporary issues in society and the environment.
We are proud of our children’s achievements in Geography which in turn supports their progress across their primary journey. We continually observe and formative assess children against curriculum end points using SONAR and use this information to plan next steps in their learning and to challenge and consolidate their skills.
In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
- A celebration of learning which demonstrates progression across the school (Curriculum Floor book);
- Pupil discussions about their learning (Pupil Voice);
- Internal monitoring strategies by SLT and the Geography Team
Children leave Barley Fields with a robust understanding of the world in which they live, they have good locational knowledge and understand many of the physical and human features and challenge we face. They are sensitive to and engaged in wider geographical issues and debates as part of our Rights Respecting and Global Goals culture.
