Geography
Intent
At Bellfield we want our pupils to have a sense of where they are and to discover the world around them.
The curriculum is designed to provide children with an in-depth and broad understanding of our world by teaching a range of concepts within different contexts. The curriculum aims to develop pupils’ skills as geographers to ensure that they acquire geographical knowledge about physical and human geography in addition to being competent in geographical skills. By teaching a range of concepts through different contexts, children will be able to link their geographical understanding to have a better understanding of places around the world.
Implementation
The curriculum at Bellfield, is designed to provide children with an in depth understanding of the geographical world. The design of the curriculum allows children to initially learn about their local area and its geographical features. It then extends to the geography Britain
in the spring term and then moves to the wider world in the summer term. As the children progress through the terms and though the school, the curriculum design allows for progression of disciplinary knowledge appropriate to the phase of the children.
The key concepts that we aim to cover are in each term for phase are:
- To investigate places
- To investigate patterns
- To communicate geographically
Each term, the new topic is launched by the Curriculum Champions (with the support of the teacher) to find out what the class have retained from previous coverage of a geographical theme. This ‘pre-planning’ information is displayed in the classroom to show how it is being built upon in the further lessons.
In EYFS, the children will learn about their immediate environment, the natural world around them and contrast this with other environments. They will also make regular weather observations. These foundations link nicely with the National Curriculum as they move through the school into Key Stage 1. All of this prior knowledge will be built upon during the following cycle.
The teaching of geography is across a whole term, developing on the skills and knowledge taught previously. Each session will begin with a recap of the vocabulary and the key substantive knowledge from the previous sessions. The aim of this is to embed the knowledge so that children can retain it for future learning.
Impact
Through regular assessment of the disciplinary knowledge demonstrate by the children in the lessons, the teacher can make judgements about the knowledge the children have acquired and aspects that may need to be recovered. Constantly referring to previous knowledge, demonstrates the individual children’s retention. At the end of a term, an assessment of both the disciplinary and substantive knowledge acquired by the children is carried out. Any gaps identified will be readdressed and the curriculum for the following term adapted to address this.
Download further information about our curriculum:
