Geography Vision Statement

Intent:

At Stoke Park Junior School, we aim to help develop children's curiosity in both their immediate surroundings and in places and environments in the wider world. As Geographers, our children will learn to value the world around them, as well as their more immediate locality through questioning, understanding and appreciation. Our purpose is to foster an interest, fascination and desire to investigate a variety of human and physical characteristics of different places, both local and afar, through purposeful research considering how they interact with each other. We want the children to understand how landscapes and environments are inter-connected and have changed over time.

As Geographers, pupils are exposed to a rich and balanced curriculum that provides them with a progression of skills and knowledge:

• They will deepen their knowledge of the location of globally significant places including their defining human and physical geographical features. This provides them with the geographical context for understanding processes
• They will become well rounded citizens, we believe children need to understand the differences between places and their cultures and be able to recognise how these change over time
• Children will understand the processes that give rise to key physical and human geographical features of the world including how these are linked and change over time
• We provide children with many opportunities to use a range of geographical skills. We strive to help them understand, present, analyse and communicate a range of information either collaboratively or as an individual. Our pupils explore and interpret a range of sources of geographical information including maps and globes and put these skills into practice both inside and outside the classroom through local fieldwork and trips.
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Implementation:

At Stoke Park Junior, we use enquiry led learning opportunities. All units have an enquiry question that form the basis of the learning and supports children to develop their disciplinary skills to evaluate and justify their thinking. Key questions also support the focus of each lesson. Lessons are carefully planned in order to develop the children’s knowledge and understanding, enabling them to answer the enquiry question. At the start of every lesson, the key vocabulary for the lesson is shared with children to support their understanding. As well as this, children are given the opportunity to carry out retrieval practise to consolidate their understanding of previous learning.

Throughout units, fieldwork, map work and experiences are planned to support the children’s development of geographical knowledge and skills. These are carefully crafted to ensure progression and that children build on their knowledge and skills over time.

Our Geography curriculum encourages children to value and be curious and fascinated about the world and its people. It helps them grow and develop as individuals and as members of our wider community. Planned opportunities are made to support children in caring for the world around them and understanding the role they have to play.

Children are given the opportunity to travel the globe visiting continents through carefully planned half termly topics. Over their time at Stoke Park, children are enabled to extend their knowledge beyond the United Kingdom as they will develop an insight into the links between physical and human processes and how landscapes and environments around the world have changed and continue to change over time. It will help them to make progress in terms of geographical knowledge and skills during their time in our school.

We provide children with a range of geographical resources including atlases and Digi maps (computer mapping) to support their locational knowledge and to be able to describe key features studied. We recognise the importance of providing children with opportunities to carry out field work and ensure each of our units allow children a chance to develop their skills of measuring, observing and presenting human and physical features in their local area.

As well as this, our geography curriculum has been developed in a way that links (where appropriate) to our history curriculum. By this, we mean there are elements of geography woven in to our history units, where appropriate.  However, we of course recognise the importance of teaching Geography in its own right.

Impact:

Our geography curriculum offers high quality and well planned lessons, which are progressive in nature. Geographical questioning helps pupils to gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of the world and its people.  We introduce children to conceptual themes such as the ‘Key Questions’, we are able to assess children’s understanding of geography. It also helps us identify areas in which we need to encourage deeper learning.

Through our curriculum, pupils learn to think critically and ask perceptive questions. In order to ensure our aims and intent have been met, we scrutinise what children have learnt through:

• Assessing children’s knowledge of key component learning.
• Assessing the quality of children’s responses of ‘Key Questions’.
• Assessing children’s understanding of topic linked vocabulary.
• Interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice conversations).
• Moderation and scrutiny of pupil’s books and professional dialogue between teachers to assess the quality of children’s learning.
• Sharing good practice in staff meetings.
• Marking of written work in books against the school’s marking policy.

Our aim is for children to leave Key Stage 2 competent in the geographical skills needed to collect, analyse and communicate data, and to interpret a range of geographical sources, including maps, globes and aerial photographs. Through the breadth and depth that our Geography curriculum offers, our children are provided with a broad knowledge of the world they live in, and understand, as responsible citizens, how they need to care and preserve the planet for future generations. This will help them aspire to protect the environment around them and in the wider world.