Geography

Intent

At Radwinter we hope to inspire a curiosity in children about the world around them and help to provoke and provide answers to questions about natural and human aspects of the world.

Geography is an investigative subject, and at Radwinter, geographical knowledge and skills are progressive, sequenced to provide an explanation of how the Earth’s features at different scales are shaped, interconnected and change over time. Children are encouraged to develop a greater understanding and knowledge of the world, as well as their place in it.

The curriculum is designed so that children are continually building on what they already know. Drawing on what they have been learning in other subjects (e.g. comparing how Stone Age made use of land with how land is used in our local area today), questions are raised to provoke careful thought about their place in the world. The knowledge and skills the children develop are transferable to other areas of the curriculum, such as SMSC, as well as RE and History.
The curriculum will equip pupils with:

• Locational knowledge about where both human and physical environments can be found
• An understanding of place and the features that define a location
• A range of skills to give purpose to their understanding

Implementation

We weave our geography lessons through our topic-based teaching, making purposeful links to wider areas of the curriculum. Although we create a topic-based approach, geography is taught as a discrete subject and is addressed as such. It is important that children understand that they are taking part in a geography lesson and that their learning correlates to their understanding on location and place. A spiral curriculum ensures that although learning is new and challenging, sometimes we revisit previously covered units. When this happens, the learning that takes place does so with greater depth, allowing children to embed previous learning, but also deepen their current understanding.  Through our geography curriculum children have opportunities to investigate and interpret a range of geographical locations in Britain and across the wider world such as South America and Europe as well as specific locations such as the Amazon Rainforest and Volcanic regions. We encourage children to become geographers through collecting and analysing information and then discussing our findings. Where possible we ensure cross curricular links with maths and literacy, giving opportunities to work with and present the information we find. Our local area is such a rich source of information that provides many opportunities for developing an understanding of its ‘place’. Geography provides excellent opportunities to support all learning abilities through investigations, outdoor learning and analysing data. We are incredibly fortunate to have a wonderful outdoor space, including our forest school and meadow, to allow children to be hands on with the environment.

Impact

At Radwinter we like to create enquiry-based curriculums, where children work in a cycle of asking and answering questions. At the beginning of each unit the children are assessed on their current knowledge and vocabulary. We use this as a baseline by which to assess them at the end of the unit. We look at areas such as the ‘sticky knowledge’ and assess whether the fundamental parts of each unit have been embedded. As with all subjects, units are broken into developing, expected and greater depth categories. Through questioning, discussion and work produced, we can see whether our learner’s essential knowledge and skills have been developed. To assess whether the children have met our aims we:

• Assess knowledge and vocabulary before and after a unit
• Share good practice in staff meetings
• Moderate both with staff in school and at other settings
• Mark written work in books against our marking policy

If you would like further information on the curriculum we teach, please contact the school directly.