Geography

Geography Overview

At Throckley Primary School, we are committed to providing a purposeful and empowering curriculum that fully prepares learners for the next steps in their school career and opens the doors to the wider world. Geography surrounds us and forms parts of our everyday life and through our geography curriculum we hope to broaden our pupil’s horizons by helping them to understand the community they live in, their interaction with the environment and the relationships between nations. Within geography, we wish to provoke curiosity through the use of enquiry-based learning to help deepen children’s understanding of the world around them and provide them with transferable skills (through our O.W.Ls) that can be used across the curriculum and outside of school.

Underpinning the curriculum at Throckley Primary School are our curriculum drivers and our key concepts which are:

Drivers

Understanding our place in the world: Pupils will explore the relationship between place and identity through their units of study and begin to explore and compare different cultures and landscapes around the world. Investigating the human and physical features of different landscapes will help pupils to uncover how our world is ever-changing.

Aspiring to achieve: Once children begin to contemplate their place in the world and how their actions influence human and physical geographical aspects of the landscape, we aim to inspire children to achieve goals that will continue to make our lives sustainable and protect our planet. Through different skills taught and honed in their geography journey at Throckley Primary School, we hope they are able to use them to drive their achievements and set aspirations for their future.

Broadening horizons: Geography gives children the perfect opportunity to explore and fall in love with the beauty of planet Earth. By participating in fieldwork studies of the local area and places further afield, children can develop an appreciation for both human and physical attributes locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. One day, we hope our pupils follow in the footsteps of famous geographers to broaden their horizons and consider their influence beyond Throckley.

Key Concepts

Place and space – We aim to provide children with the skills they will need to independently navigate new places and spaces. Children will learn how to use maps, atlases and globes to give a sense of place and location when compared to other places. They will learn how to use grid references and keys to understand what is being shown and create maps and routes for journeys they may take.

Scale and connection – Our word is interconnected and we aim to reveal to children the interdependence of the world and that no place is stand alone; it is influenced by something or someone. Children will explore how small changes in one location can have an impact on both their local area and places further afield. They will use a range of sources to help them appreciate how the world and individual country’s economies are interconnected through trade and tourism. By zooming in and out on locations and comparing sizes, distances and time taken to travel there, children will gain an understanding of how close or faraway places are as well as their size.

Physical and human geography – Children will learn how to collect, analyse and communicate a range of geographical sources and data gathered through experiences of fieldwork. They will interpret a range of sources and communicate it in a variety of ways, including through maps, numerical, quantitative skills and writing at length. They will use this to make comparisons between the human and physical geography features of different locations and understand how these change over time.

Environment and sustainability – This will be at the forefront of children’s thinking and ideas when reflecting on their place in the world and making connections both at home and across continents will develop children’s understanding of how they can influence the world’s future. Through this concept, children will examine the cause and effect of changing human and physical geography. They will consider their ethical consumer habits and the choices made by themselves and those in power about sustainability and the impact this has upon the environment. Children will be able to form judgements on choices that have already been made and determine their effect on the planet; this will help children to consider their choices in the future and they can have a significant impact upon the geography of an area in both the short term and the long term.

Culture and diversity – Respect for ethnicity and diversity through knowing more about other cultures and people is an essential part of the geography curriculum at Throckley Primary School. Children will appreciate that there is more than one way of living – understanding the culture and ‘the way people do things around here’. They will use their knowledge of culture and diversity to explore regional inequality and how parts of a location may by thriving while others are relatively poor.

Subject aims

Our geography curriculum will inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Teaching will equip pupils with diverse knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments, together with a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes. As pupils progress, their growing knowledge about the world will help them to deepen their understanding of the interaction between physical and human processes, and of the formation and use of landscapes and environments. Geographical knowledge, understanding and skills provide the frameworks and approaches that explain how the Earth’s features at different scales are shaped, interconnected and change over time. Our curriculum is diligently sequenced to ensure that knowledge gained is cumulative and we value our bespoke spaced retrieval strategies and low stakes cumulative quizzing as tools to support recall. We understand the importance of building children’s vocabulary; we achieve this through the explicit teaching of new and ambitious words which is mapped across school from nursery to Year 6. Etymology and morphology is drawn upon to give pupils a broader understanding and children use the vocabulary in their independent work.

At Throckley Primary School, we follow the National Curriculum for Geography. The aims of which are outlined below:

The national curriculum for geography aims to ensure that all pupils:

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 a 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
are competent in the geographical skills needed to:
- collect, analyse and communicate with a range of data gathered through experiences of fieldwork that deepen their understanding of geographical processes
- interpret a range of sources of geographical information, including maps, diagrams, globes, aerial photographs and Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
- communicate geographical information in a variety of ways, including through maps, numerical and quantitative skills and writing at length.