Geography

Intent: Our vision for Geography

At St Teresa’s we endeavour to inspire children’s curiosity and fascination about the world helping them develop a greater understanding of society and the environment, and an appreciation of the diversity of different places and cultures that exist across the continents. This helps shape them into the successful leaders of tomorrow.

Children need to have knowledge of the world – its cities, countries, continents, seas and oceans with an understanding of human impact on eco-systems. Our geography curriculum is designed to develop pupils’ curiosity about the world encouraging them to ask questions about things beyond their lived experience.

We aim:

To help children make sense of their own surroundings through learning about their locality, and the interaction between people and environment.

To develop children’s locational knowledge, including the defining physical and human characteristics of an area and how these provide context for understanding the geography of a place and its people.

To help pupils 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 shaped and change over time.

To develop children’s geographical skills, including interpreting maps of different scales, problem solving, investigation and the necessary vocabulary for effective geographical enquiry and field work.

To provide pupils with a variety of fieldwork experiences so they can have the opportunity to collect, analyse and use data gathered and deepen their understanding of geographical processes.

Implementation: How we teach Geography

Our Geography curriculum begins each year with a study of our local area and progresses on to explore the wider world, its people, places and the environment.

Children develop the necessary geographical concepts, knowledge, vocabulary and skills using our topic-based curriculum, giving a meaningful context to their learning. Memorable experiences that are specifically planned and designed to captivate children’s interest, helping them to retain information including, exploring the local area and offering a range of geographical experiences via fieldwork, visitors and educational visits.

We use Curriculum Maestro by Cornerstones as a planning tool with the addition of the schools own cross-curricular topics to reflect our values and community. We ensure progression and coverage through the school using a progression of skills map. Lessons are carefully planned to make sure that children are well supported in response to their own learning. At the beginning of each topic, children show what they already know in a pre-assessment. This informs planning and ensures that lessons are relevant, considering children’s different starting points. Learners will revisit geographical skills, knowledge and vocabulary in order to embed and deepen understanding. When a topic is finished a post assessment is completed to assess the child’s understanding and to ensure progression is taking place.

Geography topics build upon children’s previous experience of locational and place knowledge, environmental, human and physical geography and geographical skills and field work. This allows pupils to develop the required vocabulary and better understand how strands of learning are interlinked.

We provided a rich variety of tasks and approaches to learning during our geography curriculum to allow all children to develop connections and retain information over time. We ensure all children can access the curriculum using differentiated tasks appropriate to all ability levels. Where needed we provide children with:

• Appropriate additional resources to remove barriers to learning.
• Additional adult support.
• Help and resources to develop key vocabulary.
• A breakdown of tasks or activities into achievable steps.

Impact:

The impact of our topic-based curriculum is that children can be fully immersed in a topic. Making links across subjects embeds their learning. They celebrate what they have learnt in a variety of interesting ways through written, oral, project and creative work.

Our learners become equipped with the geographical skills and knowledge needed to develop their disciplinary knowledge leading to better geographical understanding equipping them for life as an adult in the wider world.

Using pupil interviews, book looks, lesson observations and monitoring of planning we ensure coverage and progression takes place. Pre and Post assessments are also used across the school to track progression and identify gaps.

Pupil voice tells us children enjoy and are excited by geography and their geographical vocabulary and knowledge becomes more complex as they progress through the school.

Lesson observations show the subject knowledge and teaching in geography are good and engage the pupils.

Curriculum strengths:

Children develop a good geographical vocabulary that gets more complex as they progress through the school.

Children enjoy geography and learning about other countries and places. In particular they enjoy trips out of school and map work.

Topics are knowledge rich and skills focused.

Children develop their substantive and disciplinary knowledge leading to better geographical understanding.

Children are given an appreciation of the diversity of different places and cultures that exist across the continents helping shape them into successful leaders of tomorrow.

Our community & families:

We welcome the involvement of families and the wider community in supporting our geography curriculum. Please contact our geography subject leader (via the office) if you are part of our school community and are willing to share your knowledge and experience about any of our geography topics or a country you know well.

We value the support parents and carers provide to their children at home with home learning. Geography tasks are communicated as part of our topic-based home learning often providing children with the opportunity to research further and explore a topic to support their classroom work.

Visits into our local community and the wider area utilise local resources to support our topic work. Where possible the trips and outing children go on involve walking in the local area and using public transport. This gives the children an opportunity to observe their locality and the key human and physical features of their surrounding environment, giving them a good sense of place.

Diversity:

Our curriculum is designed with our specific children in mind. Making the most of the rich and varied countries, ethnicities and cultures connected to our school community and the surrounding local area. We endeavour to reflect the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups allowing our children to gain a secure understanding of the world in which they live. This should allow all children to feel connected and engaged in the geography curriculum.