Geography

Intent:

At Laburnum Primary School, we are GEOGRAPHERS! We want our children to have no limits to what their ambitions are and grow up wanting to be cartographers, town planners, conservationists or weather forecasters. Through our curriculum, we aim to motivate and inspire children to develop curiosity, fascination and an appreciation of the world around them. 

We intend for our children to be global citizens: to develop an awareness of the wider world and their place within it, encourage them to take an active role in the community and work with others to make our planet more peaceful, sustainable and fairer.  Our curriculum is designed so that meaningful geographical knowledge and concepts are carefully sequenced for progression and depth both horizontally, over year groups, and vertically, across year groups, allowing children to build on prior learning and prior skills.

We intend to equip children with geographical skills to develop their knowledge through studying places, people, natural, human and physical geography. Through our teaching, we provoke thought, questions and to encourage children to discover answers to their own questions through exploration and research. This will enable them to gain a greater understanding and knowledge of the world and their place in it.

Implementation

We implement a curriculum that meets the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum, incorporating the four main areas of learning at each key stage: place, location, human and physical and geographical skills and fieldwork. We subscribe to Oddizzi, which ensures that both specialist and non-specialist teachers deliver high-quality geography lessons and inspire children with a deep and lifelong love of the subject. 

Teachers use questioning, and provide opportunities for discussion and investigation to support the development of vocabulary, which is explicitly taught and modelled by teachers in every lesson. Key geographical knowledge and language (such as, the name and location of continents, countries, capital cities and oceans) is revisited frequently, to make learning memorable, relevant and easy to retrieve. Children are given a knowledge organiser at the start of each unit which details some key information, key questions and vocabulary. This is to support children with their acquisition of knowledge and is used as a reference document.  These are also sent home with the children.

Location knowledge, fieldwork and map work are woven throughout the geography units.  Effective use of educational visits, local fieldwork and visitors are planned, to enrich and enhance the pupil’s learning experiences within the geography curriculum.  Fieldwork opportunities are greatly amplified through our local area units where children go out into the field to conduct observations, surveys, investigations and field sketches.  The use of maps and compasses enhances this experience.  

​Impact

By the end of their primary education at Laburnum Primary School, our learners will have gained a rich body of geographical knowledge and a wide range of transferable skills, which they can apply to other subjects and contexts. We will encourage pupils to recall and retrieve knowledge from previous terms and school years which will enable teachers to challenge children in their thinking and learning. We measure our impact based on pupils’ confidence to ask and explore questions to further their own geographical knowledge and understanding. As children’s knowledge and skills develop progressively throughout school, this will enable them to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum and prepare them to become competent geographers in secondary education.