Stainforth Kirton Lane Primary School

Geography

Intent:

‘All will achieve’ At Kirton Lane, our Geography curriculum is underpinned by our overarching aims to provide all pupils with geographical knowledge and skills that can be applied to the future challenges they are likely to face. We do this by ensuring there is purpose to learning and opportunities for application – demonstrating to our community that they can achieve.  We believe that a key role of our Geography curriculum to provide children with the understanding and purpose as to why they are learning such skills and knowledge. To make such knowledge purposeful to the children that we serve we have developed our geography progression documents to split up the knowledge that children gain into 3 ‘component knowledge’ sections, importance of place and location, human and physical geography and geographical skills and fieldwork. The aim of splitting up this knowledge is for children to ‘know more and remember more’ of the geographical knowledge then gain at Kirton Lane. We therefore aim for the Geography curriculum to equip our children for life, supporting pupils in not just their years at Kirton Lane but for their years in society. It is our determination that the wide-ranging experiences we endeavour to give all our children within their Geography learning, from field work investigations to geographical trips will encourage our pupil’s resilience, perseverance, originality, pride and bravery (characteristics that have been chosen by our pupils). We want our children to aspire to achieve their best, be able to bounce-back from setbacks and learn from mistakes, and we believe our geography curriculum supports our children to do this.

We aim for our curriculum intent and implementation to allow children to ‘know more and remember more’ of the geographical knowledge and skills that they gain at Kirton Lane. Further to this, as outlined in our curriculum intent the long-term aim for our Geography curriculum is not only for pupils to develop their understanding of geographical knowledge and skills but to provide them with an understanding of how what they learn in Geography at Kirton Lane can be applied and will directly benefit them as a member of society in the future. Alongside developing pupils understanding of the purpose of Geography we hope to instil pupil’s passion for the subject, raising ambitions and allowing pupils to see the opportunities which geography provides.

 

Books:

Our chilli challenge format forms the heart of Geography implementation at Kirton Lane. This is a consistent approach, used across all subjects in school from, Year 1 – Year 6 to formulate the teaching of an objective in Geography. This approach to learning allows teachers to provide both support and challenge to pupils allowing them to meet the needs of all learners in their class. These challenges are captured and recorded in pupils’ individual books. As of September 2022 pupils’ geography learning will stored in their own ‘geography and history book’. As of March 2023, as part of the chilli challenge format of work in books for geography the image of the component knowledge theme is displayed, along with an overarching question for the objective, and 2 pieces of vocab that the children need to understand to access the challenge. The rationale behind this is to allow children to recognise the aspect of their learning and support them to articulate their learning. Practical work, including field work and learning outdoors, is also a focus of Geography work across all year groups. Teacher often use photos or video clips to recording pupil’s work as appropriate.

Geography is not taught as an explicit subject but instead skills and knowledge are developed through provision and provision activities, focused on the 3 characteristics of learning. At Kirton Lane teachers in EYFS take observations of children against the ELG’s. Children’s learning in Geography is also captured through pictures and evidence of work kept in the ‘Understanding the world’ floor book. This is kept visible in the classroom and available for anybody to look at. Staff have worked alongside EYFS staff to ensure that the Year 1 progression document outlines the knowledge and geographical knowledge and understanding children will have gained in EYFS.

Another key aspect of Geography curriculum implementation at Kirton Lane is the importance of providing and using outdoor learning experiences. This is an important aspect of EYFS, who continuously use the outdoor area to provide purposeful learning experiences. However, this is also something that we value using across all year groups to support pupils’ geographical study including field work and field work study.

 

Planning:

As of September 2023 Kirton, Lane has developed their own geography progression documents. This document outlines the national curriculum objectives and lines up exactly where from cornerstones and how this knowledge is delivered at Kirton Lane. To support the craft of chilli challenges when planning this document demonstrates how both the knowledge and skill is progressive throughout the year groups. This supports staff planning as it aims to give staff a clear understanding of which geography objectives are taught, in which topic, and gives the specific activity from cornerstones this is delivered through. To further support planning each Year group has their own ‘knowledge map’ these documents outline the exact knowledge each year group will deliver per topic. These have resources such as map and figures for teachers to use, include vocabulary for teachers to cover and links to learning for life. Staff have worked alongside EYFS staff to ensure that the Year 1 progression document outlines the knowledge and geographical knowledge and understanding children will have gained in EYFS.

 

Classroom environment:

In Years 1-6 Geography is displayed in the classroom on ‘our learning journey’ display board. This has each week’s work on it as a reminder for the children to link their learning back to previous knowledge. This display also has our component theme pictures on to help to allow children to link their Geography learning.

Each classroom has a ‘vocab cake’. This is a whole school approach to support pupil’s articulation and understanding of vocabulary. These are designed to be a working wall to display important vocabulary for each topic covered, including geographical vocabulary. Children will use these pieces of vocabulary when answering ‘hot’ and ‘blow your top’ questions.

The knowledge learnt in Geography across school has recently been developed, refined and categorised into 3 key component knowledge themes. These are:

Knowledge, skills & understanding explored in Geography are learnt through the 'Develop' stage and applied when relevant in the 'Innovate & Express' stage