Brookburn’s Intent:
Studying Geography develops children’s knowledge and understanding of what is around them in the local area, in Britain and globally. They will know and understand their sense of space and place. Brookburn children will know how people, regions and cultures are connected. This will support an understanding and knowledge in the next stage of education and throughout life.
Geography provides Brookburn children with knowledge and vocabulary to describe the features of the environment and the processes that shape it. Children will understand the spatial layout and organisation of the world about them and recognise the spatial distributions, patterns and relationships in the environment.
By the end of primary school, Brookburn children will know and understand:
Physical geography: climate zones, rivers, mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, the water cycle
Human Geography:, types of settlement and economic activity and the distribution of natural resources.
Environmental geography: natural resources and how people can harm or protect the environment.
Locational knowledge: general geographical knowledge regarding position and significance, UK and global
Place knowledge: local study, UK, European and non-European
Skills: Enquiry, mapping, fieldwork and geographical vocabulary
Our Implementation:
The geographical units have been designed to ensure lessons, activities and tasks, deliver appropriately our curriculum intentions.
The three key geography strands across our school are:
- Our Place
- Our World
- Our Planet
Our children study Geography every term. We have selected knowledge that we need our children to know by the end of year 6.
Key geographical ideas or Thinking Concepts are returned to each lesson and help children to know and remember more.
The Thinking Concepts are:
Our curriculum plans outline the essential knowledge, thinking concepts and places for each geography unit. There are four geography concepts that will be studied:
- Locational and place knowledge,
- Human and physical geography
- Environment
- Fieldwork
The geography unit connects to previous knowledge and prepares for future knowledge. The curriculum plans will include key vocabulary and links to key significant places. Our curriculum has been designed so that children connect and revisit through careful curriculum sequencing. Each lesson builds on from the previous lesson
From our curriculum design, lessons are carefully planned so that the knowledge and skills are delivered through purposeful and appropriate tasks building knowledge, skills and understanding from one lesson to another, one geographical unit to the next, one year to the next. Our curriculum is designed so children are taught the knowledge and then use their knowledge.
Impact
Children at Brookburn enjoy geography. We know this because our children tell us – they talk about things that they have loved learning and compliment these discussions with facts and wider knowledge they have gained because of their own interest in researching and reading beyond the curriculum.
The knowledge and skills the children develop, and the progress they make, is evidenced from the pupil interviews, observations and book looks carried out over the year.
By the end of Key Stage 2, children have a sound understanding of the places locations and environments they have studied. They can question, use evidence and think critically to understand geographical knowledge of places, their human and physical features and the impact on our planet.
We teach knowledge and children use knowledge, children move from a basic understanding to an advanced model where understanding is applied. Our lessons build on prior knowledge and link back and forwards to embed knowledge.
Field and map work throughout the school demonstrates how children use their knowledge and understanding of geography to enhance and strengthen the quality and purpose of their ideas.