Intent

At Preston Candover CE Primary School, we believe that a high-quality geography education should inspire our children with curiosity and fascination about the world they live in and equip them with the knowledge and skills to become future stewards of our planet. Geography involves our children discovering the relationships and interactions between people and the environments in which they live and the wider world on a personal, local, national and global scale. Through exploration of both diversity and the interconnections between landscapes, people and resources, we want to deepen our children’s understanding of the many contemporary challenges our planet is faced with – climate change, food security and energy choices. Most importantly we want our children to understand how geography impacts upon every aspect of their lives and how it plays a crucial role in developing caring and understanding citizens of tomorrow.

Implementation

Through our challenging curriculum, based on the Early Years Framework and National curriculum, our children work as Geographers developing knowledge and skills to answer and reflect upon key questions in every theme. Geography lessons are blocked to enable our children to immerse themselves in the learning. Our curriculum has been designed to enable our children to consolidate, build upon and deepen their enquiry-based learning and critical thinking skills through a progression in understanding key geographical concepts as they progress across the school. Existing knowledge is checked at the beginning of each topic. This ensures that teaching is informed by the children’s starting points and that it takes account of the pupil's voices, incorporating their interests. Tasks are selected and designed to provide appropriate challenges to all learners and to develop independent working and confidence, in line with the school’s commitment to inclusion. At the end of each topic, key knowledge is reviewed by the children and checked by the teacher and consolidated as necessary.

Topic Vocabulary underpins children’s understanding of subject-specific language, reminding children of previous knowledge and providing visual and summative information on key knowledge to be learned. Teachers support children in engaging in independent tasks. Opportunities to develop their skills and fieldwork using maps and atlases (both physical and digital) will be provided for all pupils. Fieldwork allows pupils to apply geographical skills in a real-life setting and explore their local area and the features within it. We will develop deep subject knowledge and key skills while differentiating work for all abilities. Geography assessment is ongoing and informs teachers with planning lesson activities and differentiation; it is tracked against the National curriculum Geography objectives.

Please use the links below to explore our geography curriculum further: