Geography

How do we teach Geography?

Intent:

At Bromham CofE Primary School Geography education should be fully inclusive to every child. Our aims are to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for Geography; providing a broad and balanced and differentiated curriculum; ensuring the progressive development of geographical concepts, knowledge and skills; and for the children to develop a love for geography. Furthermore, we aim to inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will provide a strong foundation for the rest of their lives. Teaching should equip pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments, together with a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes (The 2014 Primary National Curriculum in England)

Geography teaching at Bromham Primary School has a wide application to everyday life, teaching the children to have the confidence to aim high, so that they enjoy learning about the world and to have a better understanding of how people live in different locations.

The aims of teaching geography in our school are:

to inspire pupils’ curiosity to discover more about the world
to enable children to know about the location of the world’s continents, countries, cities, seas and oceans.
to develop in children the skills of interpreting a range of sources of geographical information, including maps, globes, atlases, aerial photographs.
to help children understand how the human and physical features of a place shapes it location and can change over time
to provide opportunities to write geographically to answer a line of enquiry or recall what they have learnt.

Special Educational Needs Disability (SEND) / Pupil Premium / Higher Attainers

All children will have Quality First Teaching. Any children with identified SEND or in receipt of pupil premium funding may have work additional to and different from their peers in order to access the curriculum dependent upon their needs. As well as this, our school offers a demanding and varied curriculum, providing children with a range of opportunities in order for them to reach their full potential and consistently achieve highly from their starting points.

Implementation:

To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in geography, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Geography is taught discretely, but links are made where relevant, for example studying The River Nile in Year 4 Geography and locating where in the world Egypt is during their longitude and latitude topic, which links to their History lessons on the Ancient Egyptians. The curriculum focuses on the key knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum. At Bromham Primary, we ensure that geography has the same importance given to it as the core subjects, as we feel it is important in enabling all children to gain knowledge in all subjects, as we continue to recognise that all our students have unique potentials.

The geography curriculum at Bromham Primary is based upon the 2014 Primary National Curriculum in England, which provides a broad framework and outlines the knowledge and skills taught in each Key Stage. To enhance this, we have developed a curriculum based on research of Sweller’s Cognitive load theory and Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, which supports the theory behind the design of our curriculum. We block units to ensure we revisit and retrieve information throughout the years in order to move information taught from their working memory to their long term memory, through designing ways to build schema to support their retention of key knowledge across the curriculum. The curriculum links theory from Rosenshine, 2012, principles of instruction. The teachers model and sequence new learning, to be able to return weekly, monthly and then yearly. They scaffold and guide learning, before checking for understanding. In geography, we also use the power of dual coding through knowledge organisers and learning strips to support children’s retention and recall of information. We also focus on essential vocabulary and concepts. Vocabulary pages are used to draw attention to Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary covered throughout the curriculum.

Geography teaching focuses on enabling children to think as geographers. A variety of teaching approaches are used based on the teacher’s judgement.

Geography provides excellent opportunities to enhance the learning of more able pupils through the investigations, analysing sources and writing extending pieces.

At Bromham Primary school, we provide a variety of opportunities for geography learning inside and outside the classroom. Educational visits are another opportunity for the teachers to plan for additional geography learning outside the classroom. At Bromham Primary, the children are to be provided with opportunities to experience geography on educational visits. The children have explored the local area including orienteering within the school grounds and visiting The River Great Ouse to conduct river studies. Local museums also provide an opportunity to further geography learning, as well as trips to local woods and using map reading skills during residential trips. During the Year 5 residential to Wales, they also have the opportunity to study a river from it source to mouth, looking at the different features of its course.

Impact:

Within geography, we strive to create a supportive and collaborative ethos for learning by providing investigative and enquiry based learning opportunities. All of the lessons are designed around learning questions to begin their line of enquiry. The children are also provided with Knowledge Organisers and learning strips to enhance the embedding of knowledge, with the use of dual coding to help with retention and building up of schema in their knowledge. At the end of some units of work there is an end of unit essay, where they can answer a line of enquiry, and are encouraged to recall information learnt. We use beginning and end of unit quizzes to highlight key learning, which we introduce and revisit as the topic progresses. All lessons have a vital vocabulary page, with a specific focus on T2 and T3 vocabulary being introduced throughout the topic. Core texts from Curriculum Visions and other texts are used to enhance knowledge and reading within the geography curriculum. Throughout the year new information is introduced and revisited. Through this, the children will deepen their understanding of the interaction between physical and human processes and how this affects landscapes and environments.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

Beginning and end of unit quizzes, which are also revisited later in the year through revisit sessions.
Assessing children’s understanding of topic linked vocabulary throughout their learning.
End of unit essays to show they can recall their learning and apply it to answering an enquiry style question.
Images of the children’s practical learning.
Pupil book studies, where children are interviewed about their learning, and what they can recall. (Pupil Voice)
Learning walks of the environment and photographs of sequences of learning are taken, this is then discussed during staff meetings, where sequences of learning are scrutinised and there is the opportunity for a dialogue between teachers to understand their class’s work.
Annual reporting of standards across the curriculum.
Marking of written work in books.
Assessment sheets collected at the end of each unit.

Eternal measures are also used to moderate the learning taking place, such as attending CPD events to learn about different geography curriculums in other settings, and use this to provide feedback to staff and continue to improve the geography provision at Bromham Primary.

Geography

Geography

Subject Knowledge Overview

Subject Roadmap

Progression of Skills

How do we teach Geography?