Geography

Subject Knowledge Overview

Subject Roadmap

How do we teach Geography?

Intent:

At Bromham CofE Primary School we strive to educate every child within our geography lessons, making it inclusive. Our aims are to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for Geography; providing a broad and balanced and inclusive curriculum; ensuring the progressive development of geographical concepts, knowledge and skills; and for the children to develop a love for geography. Furthermore, we want every child to develop a passion for geography and be keen to go out and explore the world, using their new locational knowledge and ability to identify key features within the area. 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).

Within our teaching of Geography, we want our children to build their own confidence to enjoy their learning, but also to strive for the highest understanding as possible of how people live in different locations and apply their new knowledge to everyday life.

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 children’s 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 its location and can change over time.
to provide opportunities to write geographically to answer a line of enquiry or recall what they have learnt.

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 throughout the year, ensuring that units are revisited at different points in the year to ensure we can retrieve information 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. 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.

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

At Bromham Primary school, we provide opportunities in every year group to experience fieldwork in their local area. Educational visits are another opportunity for the teachers to plan for additional geography learning outside the classroom. 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. Year 3 and 4 also take part in an overnight residential where they have the opportunity to explore other geographical areas such as orienteering around a country park.

What have you done to ensure every skill is covered?

A skills progression map has been created for geography. This document produces an overview of the key skills being taught for each year group and topic. The map also shows the class teacher how the skills will develop over the years, making it useful for informing medium and long term planning. As a subject lead, it is my job to look through the medium term plans for Geography and identify which skills are being taught throughout the sequence of lessons.

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. We use end of unit quizzes to highlight key learning, which we introduce and revisit as the topic progresses. All lessons involve looking at key vocabulary that the children will need to understand, 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:

End of unit quizzes, which are also revisited later in the year through revisit sessions with these questions being assess accumulatively as the lessons go on.
Assessing children’s understanding of topic linked vocabulary throughout their learning.
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.
Annual reporting of standards across the curriculum.
Marking of written work in books.
Teacher assessment of each lesson, identifying those who have excelled in the lesson and those that needed support.

External 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.