Geography
Geography
A high-quality geography education should inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination of the world and its’ people. Through their geography education, pupils will develop in depth knowledge and skills relating to both human and physical geography in the local and wider world. Through high quality teaching and planned progression of geographical skills and vocabulary pupils will progress and reach or exceed their potential. At Ashbury Meadow, we use the Rising Stars curriculum to structure and support planning of our geography spiral curriculum, this ensures progression between the year group and provides teachers with planning support.
In class, teachers will plan for a variety of practical and enquiry-based learning opportunities. This will include cross-curricular links that respond to the needs of the cohort and the global team will plan and organise whole school focus days for events such as global cultural events.
Through our geography spiral curriculum for years 1-6, we offer opportunities to build upon the knowledge and skills learnt in EYFS, in the specific area of learning ‘Understanding the world’.
The spiral curriculum uses key enquiry questions, with links to locality, to develop pupils' disciplinary knowledge, broken down into key concepts and organising concepts to enable pupils to:
- Develop contextual knowledge of the location of globally significant places- both terrestrial and marine- including their defining physical and human characteristics and how these provide geographical context for understanding the actions of processes
- Understand the processes that give rise to key physical and human geographical features of the world, how these are interdependent and how they bring about spatial variation and change over time
- Develop the geographical skills needed to:
- Collect, analyse and communicate data collected from fieldwork
- Interpret a range of geographical sources of information
- Communicate geographical information in a variety of ways, including maps and writing at length.
Each year group takes part in orienteering activities throughout the year to enable them to develop map work skills in a practical and purposeful manner and also local study week, to enhance knowledge and skills. This year, each year group performed fieldwork investigations, photographs of their work can be found in the images folder below.
The following broad ‘dimensions’ of progress – what it means to ‘get better’ at geography – indicate how geography learning progresses throughout school:
- moving outwards from the familiar to the less familiar
- acquiring greater fluency with ‘world knowledge’
- working with increasingly complex and/or abstract ideas and generalisations
- using data that becomes more multivariate
- investigating people-environment relations
- applying geographical thinking to new contexts and situations
- becoming more precise (in language, ideas, skills), and making distinctions
- becoming more comfortable with ‘grey areas’ where answers are not so clear cut
- connecting information and ideas, and building (not just receiving) new knowledge
- drawing on increasing breadth of content and contexts
- understanding the importance of perspective, recognising a range of values and views.
- develop pupils’ understanding of academic vocabulary by providing them with twelve key words for each geographical unit
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