Curriculum Principles
Geography provokes and answers questions about the natural and human worlds, encouraging children to develop and greater understanding of the world and their place in it. Geography develops the values of the school: embracing the wider community and encouraging respect for our diverse society.
Topics build year –on –year with increasing complexity and depth in a sequenced, spiral programme that builds on prior learning as the pupils’ progress through school.
Geography is the lead subject of the Spring term project but interconnects with other subjects within the learning in Autumn and Summer terms. This approach ensures substantive knowledge is deliberately and explicitly taught and organised towards answering a disciplinary appropriate question. We explore places at different scales to encourage children to consolidate their understanding, contextualize their learning and develop a broader, global appreciation of places. We encourage the children to think and question like a geographer. This allows them to make sense of the real world and make links between places and how these change over time.
We use guidance from the Geographical Association and other validated resources to support our work.
What is geography?
‘Geography is a subject packed with excitement and dynamism that synthesises aspects of the world and helps us to better understand its people, places and environments, and the interactions between them. Geography helps us understand how and why places are changing, and to better imagine, predict and work towards, likely and preferred futures. Underpinning all of this is a strong spatial component that deepens our understanding of what places are like, why and how they are connected, and the importance of location.’
- Where is this place?
- What is it like? (And why?)
- How and why is it changing?
- How does this place compare with other places?
- How and why are places connected?
- What could/should the world be like in the future?
- What can we do to influence change?
We believe that geography is a dynamic subject where thinking and viewpoints change. Places are dynamic and often space is perceived, used and contested by people in many different ways. Geography seeks to understand how different views, values and perspectives influence and affect places and environments at different scales. It helps explain why places are changing, how they are interconnected and why patterns of inequality exist at both local and global scales.
Many of the ‘memorable moments’ of a child’s primary school education come from the first-hand, hands-on experiences of being a geographer. We believe that the inclusion of fieldwork is an essential element that enables pupils to connect with a place, community or environment and it doesn’t even have to be beyond walking distance.
Our local area
‘The school locality is a rich resource for geographical enquiry. It is accessible for fieldwork, can be studied in a great variety of ways and helps pupils to develop a sense of their place.’ We use our local area to support fieldwork across the geography curriculum.
Physical Geography
- Water features: streams, rivers, ponds
- Landscape features: slopes, hills, plateaus
- Rocks and soils: surfaces where rocks may be observed, places to take soil samples
- Weather and seasonal change: weather observations and measurements; microclimates; seasonal change; evidence of weathering
- Natural areas: different plants and wildlife, range of habitats, outdoor learning space, Litcham Common
Human Geography
- Range of buildings: building materials, former uses, architectural style, St Andrews Church, railway lines
- Range of land uses: industry & services, transport, settlement~ origins and evidence of growth
Environmental geography~ Changes over time to buildings and land use
- Environmental quality
- Caring for the environment
- Local issues
- Sustainable development
- Exploring sustainability in everyday life
Local fieldwork
We teach the children to:
- explore what fieldwork is and why geographers do fieldwork
- explore maps including 4/6 figure grid references
- create sketch maps of the local community
- explore the local area and use satellite images
- identify a question to answer
- collect data and present/ analyse the data to answer the enquiry question
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