"Geography is the study of Earth as the home of people."

Yi-Fu Tuan

Intent

At Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Primary School, we strive to create a love and interest for geography and to inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the world around them.

We aim to help our children to gain the knowledge, skills and understanding to become life-long geographers. We want to instil a thirst for knowledge about the world and understand how human and physical changes have shaped the world we live in today.
 
Our curriculum is based on three themes: Pride in our Place, Aspire and Achieve and Ignite Possibilities. Through these themes, we educate our children to take pride in the geography of the local area, to explore geographical achievements and to learn from current geographical issues to help us to make a difference for the future. Our geography curriculum helps pupils gain a coherent, knowledge and understanding of the world.
 
We follow the National Curriculum for Primary Geography beginning with EYFS, Knowledge and Understanding of the World. A history progression map from Y1-Y6 builds upon prior knowledge in a carefully sequenced curriculum and makes links to other subject areas where possible. Our geography curriculum has bespoke substantive concepts which is threaded throughout: natural environments, landforms, climate, population, migration, trade and tourism, built environments, settlement and land use. 

Implementation

Our geography curriculum is taught using the Great Teaching Toolkit, 2020. We endeavour to be consistent in our approach to create a supportive environment for pupils to learn  using through adaptive teaching techniques and Voice 21 talk tactics. We activate hard thinking through our thinking schools strategies and Q Matrix questioning to bring history to life and develop a real sense of enquiry. At Our Lady Star of the Sea, we have a consistent recipe for teaching following Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction to teach History.

Impact

Our well planned and well-taught lessons provide pupils with opportunities to research and apply skills independently - skills essential for lifelong learning. Pupils will leave KS2 with a strong knowledge of their local area and the location of other countries and cities around the world. All pupils will be able to discuss and recall a variety of events and where they happened in the world, as well as explain aspects of human and physical geography and confidently use maps and atlases (physical and digital).

The knowledge and skills acquired throughout their time at Our Lady Star of the Sea enables them to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum and prepares pupils to become competent geographers before entering secondary education. We want pupils to have thoroughly enjoyed learning about geography, therefore encouraging them to undertake new life experiences now and in the future.