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Intent
At Kirk Merrington, through our Geography curriculum, we aim to expand geographical vocabulary, increase our children’s knowledge and curiosity of the wider world and promote high aspirations.
We seek to create a life-long love of the subject, through teaching our children about diverse places, people and resources. Through the study of natural and human environments, as well as physical and human processes, our desire is to provide our children with a sense of awe and wonder about the world they live in.
As they continue on their journey of Geography, we aim to foster a deep understanding of the subject that develops alongside their geographical skills. Our aim is that our children go on to apply these skills across all subjects, as well as in their futures beyond Kirk Merrington. Our curriculum is designed to provide our children with the subject specific language they need to describe, question and discuss the world, as well as their place in it.
Implementation
Based upon the National Curriculum, we have created a progressive Geography Long Term Plan, which sets out the objectives taught in each year group. We alternate our Geography and History topics ensuring that our children receive a well-rounded teaching of the humanities subjects throughout the year. At times, we take the opportunity to create links between the two subjects to help solidify the learning taking place. Each individual lesson has content that is differentiated between, and within, year groups so that learning is age-appropriate and high expectations are maintained. Globes are displayed in each classroom and teachers are encouraged to reference these during lessons to help to develop an awareness of our place in the world. We make regular use of Digimaps, to enhance our mapwork and children are taught to effectively use an atlas and other digital imagery to identify and locate landmarks.
Teachers use questioning, and provide opportunities for discussion and investigation to support the development of vocabulary, which is explicitly taught and modelled by teachers in lessons, as noted on the planning. Children are encouraged to think about key geographical vocabulary and note these on a ‘Speak like a Geographer’ sheet in their books. Other Key geographical knowledge and language (such as, the name and location of continents, countries, capital cities and oceans) is revisited frequently, to make learning memorable, relevant and easy to retrieve.
We support learning with trips to inspire our children and widen their cultural experiences. Fieldwork is undertaken from investigating our school grounds and walks around the village to visits to our heritage coast, our city, Durham and its locality. Teachers also use a range of resources such as video clips, photographs and newspaper articles during lessons to help create immersive learning experiences.
Impact
The impact of our Geography curriculum is measured in a variety of ways: questioning during lesson time, marking children’s written work, listening to child-led discussion, interviewing pupils across the school about their learning and analysing planning alongside book scrutinies. Children are encouraged to learn about the world around them and appreciate topical environmental issues and react to them.
By end of the Geography curriculum at Kirk Merrington, our children will:
Have a growing knowledge of the world and their place in it; have a wider vocabulary of geographical terms; aspire to discover more about the world, through reading, travel or the media; know that they can use their voice to express themselves and their opinions; develop their geographical skills, such as, evaluation, creativity, problem solving and enquiry.
