Geography Curriculum

Geography at Plymouth Grove Primary School

Our Geography Leader is Miss Riaz

Article 29 of the UNCRC: a child or young person's education should help their mind, body and talents be the best they can

Global Goal 4: Quality Education

Intent 

Geography teaches an understanding of places and environments. Children at Plymouth Grove learn about their local area Manchester and compare their life in this area with that in other regions in the United Kingdom and in the rest of the world. They learn how to draw and interpret maps and they develop the skills of research, investigation, analysis and problem-solving. Through their growing knowledge and understanding of human geography, children gain an appreciation of life in other cultures. Geography teaching also motivates children to find out about the physical world and enables them to recognize the importance of sustainable development for the future of mankind.

Implementation

Geography is taught through the framework of the 2014 National Curriculum, with geography planning linked to the school’s age-related expectations (ARE), which are revisited 3 times throughout the year allowing progress to be monitored. The curriculum is designed so that it is ambitious for all learners. Knowledge, skills and concepts are clearly outlined in an age-appropriate and progressive way from Y1-Y6 so that the children’s understanding is extended, year upon year ( e.g. A thread of learning -Y2 looks at UK countries, Y3 at the counties, Y4 Countries in a continent, Y5 states of USA and Y6 European countries.) .

Knowledge organisers detail the key learning points of the Topic. Medium-term planning details success criteria, learning intentions (WALTs) and challenge questions to develop greater depth and critical thinking. KL. grids are used to establish pupils starting points.

Educational visits are a key feature of our geographical skills and enquiry planning; the school subsidizes a range of trips to enrich the curriculum making meaningful cross curricular links. A programme of trips are being developed to allow for progressive geography field work, including:

Y1 Trips to Formby Beach and a local church

Y2 Local area Trip to Swinton Grove Park

Y3 Lake District

Y4 Local area trip

Y5 Chester Zoo, Salford War Museum.

Y6 Outward Bound Camping Trip -End of Year Alton Towers

Geography is often used as a topic focus for the term but we also aim to ensure that it is integrated into other areas of the curriculum.

We use online resources- Digimap, Google Maps, aerial photographs, atlases ,globes and are building a set of Topic books for each year group. 

At the end of each year, the children’s learning is assessed against the age-related expectations (AREs).

At Plymouth Grove, we use summative and formative assessment to determine children’s understanding and inform teachers planning. This takes the form of quizzes, fact files, information leaflets and student presentations. We use oracy skills to provide assessment information in the form of Debates and focused classroom discussion. These discussion points may sometimes be recorded as a Record.

This is reviewed on a termly basis by the subject leader, who also carries out regular learning walks, book scrutinies and lesson observations. Children are expected to make good or better progress in Geography and this individual progress is tracked and reported to parents and carers at parents evening and on the end of year report.

Impact

Fischer Family Trust curriculum tracker is used to record the progress the progress that pupils are making in terms of knowing more, remembering more and being able to do more  at the end of each academic year. This will record whether the children are working towards the age related expectations, at the age related expectations or exceeding the age related expectations. 

These judgements will be quality assured by subject leaders using first-hand evidence of how pupils are doing, drawing together evidence from pupil interviews, observations of tasks, reading tasks, work scrutinies and  discussions with pupils about what they remembered about the content they have studied.

These judgements will inform the curriculum and whether children are ready for the next stage of their education.

Geography teaching develops a range of investigation and problem-solving skills that are transferable to other curriculum areas especially Science, Mathematics, English.

Our children enjoy lessons and we believe this early love of learning stimulates children to become life-long learners and have an awareness of the World around them.