Our Vision Intent
At St Thomas’ Leesfield, we shape our Geography curriculum to ensure it is fully inclusive to every child. Our aims are to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for Geography; providing a broad, balanced and differentiated curriculum; ensuring the progressive development of geographical concepts, knowledge, skills and attitudes; and for the children to develop a love for geography.
At St Thomas’ Leesfield, we have a high quality Geography curriculum which inspires in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people. Our teaching equips pupils with knowledge about places and people; resources in the environment; physical and human processes; formation and use of landscapes. We also want children to develop geographical skills: collecting and analysing data; using maps, globes, aerial photographs and digital mapping to name and identify countries, continents and oceans; and communicating information in a variety of ways. We want children to enjoy and love learning about geography by improving attitudes and gaining skills and knowledge (ASK), not just through experiences in the classroom, but also with the opportunity for real-life fieldwork using the local environment as well as motivational educational visits to further enhance learning.
Implementation of Our Vision
In ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in geography, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Geography is taught as part of a weekly or two weekly topic, focusing on the required knowledge and skills outlined in the National Curriculum including the Earth’s key physical and human processes. We teach our children using a variety of resources to enable them to develop an understanding of the world around us, give them skills to question and explore and enjoy their topics.
Children in EYFS learn through a topic-based curriculum that focuses on developing their knowledge and understanding of the world (Early Learning Goal). We ensure children are curious, engaged and given focused and independent activities that enhance their experience of the world from their unique perspectives.
Throughout the rest of school (Y1-Y6), each topic gives the children the chance to ask questions about their learning. The children have 6 or 9 ‘sticky learning’ objectives linked to their topic that they will explore and learn about throughout the duration of their topic and hopefully these will be embedded into long-term memory.
At St Thomas’ Leesfield, we ensure that geography has the same importance given to it as the core subjects, as we feel this is crucial in enabling all children to gain ‘real-life’ experiences and to make sense of the world and its diverse places and people.
Through our hidden curriculum the children develop skills to help them care about our world and hopefully work to make it a sustainable place to live. This can be seen in evidence form School Council initiatives, Eco Committee objectives/themes, Community Cohesion (with our link school, Westwood), Commando Joe and the Oldham Pledge work. Through our whole school ethos and Christian Values, we teach children to care about our world and learn how to work with each other to make it a better place to live. Our Eco Committee are committed to improving our school and local environment and making an impact in our world not just now but for the future. We use ‘Word Aware’ as a tool to support children with the vocabulary linked to each topic. Some of these words are what the children already know and they build up to new vocabulary that they will use in their ‘sticky learning’ and relate back to them on our ‘Remember, Remember…’ board & sessions.
Impact
The impact and measure of this is to ensure that children at St Thomas’ Leesfield are equipped with the necessary attitudes, skills and knowledge (ASK) within our Geography curriculum/topics that will enable them to be ready for further in-depth, focused learning at Key Stage 3 and for life as an adult in the wider world.
We want the children to have thoroughly enjoyed learning about geography, therefore encouraging them to undertake new life experiences now and in the future.
Our Geography Learning Journey
Please select the document below.
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Learning Journey - Geography - Reception - Year 6 | [pdf 351KB] |
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Geography
Please use the links below to access our learning resources.