Our aims are to ensure that our students experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge. Our history and geography curriculums are designed to aid teachers in helping students to form schema within their long-term memories.
We teach topics that match the objectives listed in the National Curriculums Statutory Requirements for History and Geography. As a school we use the Chris Quigley Curriculum Companions to structure and implement our History and Geography curriculum.
Threshold concepts tie together the subject topics into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, students return to the same concepts over and over, and gradually build an understanding of them. These big ideas (threshold concepts) are consistent threads running through a child's learning journey. They are covered through the knowledge categories. The knowledge categories are made explicit to the children and are referred to regularly. In this way, children can begin to make links and comparisons between different topics.
Threshold Concepts
Knowledge Categories
The children’s breadth of study has been carefully considered to give the right balance of coverage and depth. Classes alternate between a history and geography focus but are encouraged to exploit natural links between the two subject areas. For example, when looking at the Ancient Egyptians a lesson on the geographical importance of the Nile is important. In EYFS, the children are introduced to our geography and history lenses (our knowledge categories - see above).