Geography

“The study of Geography is about more than just memorising places on a map, it’s about understanding the complexity of our world".

Barack Obama

Key Documents:

Progression in Geography EYFS to Year 6

Geography Curriculum Overview Whole School

Intent

Geography teaching at Mattersey aims to provide our pupils with a high quality curriculum to inspire, challenge and enthuse our pupils to understand more about the world around them. Teaching the key concepts of location, place, physical and human processes, will provide our pupils with the opportunity to develop geographical knowledge progressively over the course of their time at school whilst undertaking field work and developing geographical skills that promote curiosity for learning. Having an engaging and active geography curriculum can help to raise cultural capital and develop connections through people, events, places and cultures, as well as ensuring our pupils have a strong sense of respect and knowledge for the local area, country and world that they live in.

Implementation

Our Geography curriculum focuses on developing the knowledge necessary for children to understand the changes in the world around them and the impact they have in the world. We intend to build up the pupils’ knowledge and develop their skills as they move through the primary curriculum in these main areas: Locational Knowledge, Place Knowledge. Human and Physical Geography and Geographical Field Work and Skills. 

Geography is an important subject and therefore many of our half termly units of work have Geography as the key subject link. It is taught as an independent subject, as well as with a cross curricular approach. For example, learning about volcanoes and producing art work to demonstrate knowledge, orienteering and field work skills in PE, Scientific enquiry skills through water cycle investigations, studying a text about the Amazon Rainforest in English.

The Geography curriculum is clearly mapped out to ensure full coverage of the content of the National Curriculum and is organised into key areas of location, place, physical and human geography and field work. The subject is taught to be remembered and as part of this, links are made in other subject areas to enable pupils to utilise their geographical knowledge and skills. Across school, lessons have a ‘Big Question’ approach, which supports children’s understanding of the key learning within each lesson. Furthermore, the Success criteria, presented to children as Green statements help to ensure that they are very clear about how they can show their knowledge and achievements in this subject.

 Geography is an essential aspect of the Foundation Stage as it is incorporated in every day learning. The geographical aspects of the children’s work relate to the objectives set out in the EYFS Development Matters statements and the Early Learning Goals relating to the area Understanding the World.

In Key Stage 1, the pupils will begin by learning about their local environment and be able to identify the countries that make up the United Kingdom and their capital cities, as well as being able to name and locate continents and oceans of the world. They will also begin to identify human and physical locations by looking at natural and man-made items in their local area.

In Key Stage 2, the pupils will develop their locational and place knowledge by using maps, atlases and digital media such as Google Earth to name and locate counties, countries and cities around the world. They will use fieldwork skills to collect and analsye data, as well as looking closely at physical and human processes such as volcanoes, earthquakes and global warming to ensure they have a broad knowledge of local and world geography.  

Impact

The children at Mattersey Primary will know and remember more as they progress through the Geography curriculum. They will understand geographical concepts and have an understanding of the environment that shapes the world we live in today from their local area to the UK, Europe and the World. They will have enthusiasm for the subject and develop a sense of curiosity, as well as developing skills such as map reading, collecting data, asking and answering questions and testing hypotheses, and will develop their knowledge and skills through independent working and teamwork, with the ability to transfer these skills to other areas of learning as they then leave primary education and move into Key Stage 3- as well as for living life in the wider world.