Our history curriculum stimulates pupils’ intellectual curiosity about the world and its rich history.
Learning about the past is fascinating and exciting and we inspire that fascination and excitement in our children. Our history curriculum has been carefully planned to ensure; good coverage of historical periods, exposure to different cultures, recurring links to historical themes and understanding of the impact locally, nationally and globally.
Children start their journey as a historian in Early Years where they learn about the idea of past and present, old and new. Children in early years learn to pose ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ type questions about their own and others experiences. This understanding progresses into posing questions about people in the past. Through outstanding teaching, we develop our children as historians so that by the end of KS2 they have a clear chronological understanding of history and can confidently articulate the significance of these periods and the impact they have on their own lives.
We understand the equal importance of both knowledge about the past how to use enquiry to understand how we know about the past. Each unit of work allows time for the direct teaching of knowledge as well as acquiring and exploring knowledge themselves through enquiry. As such, we use a progressive set of enquiry skills that mirror our approach in geography to ensure children have the opportunity to develop their higher level think skills, e.g. making reasoned judgements and synthesising ideas from multiple sources. Drawing all this together, opportunities are given to debate ideas and make arguments as to why history is still open to interpretation.
As a school we recognise that history teaching is cross-curricular and we identify those opportunities, for example through; the time period of a story, when historical events occurred, and learning about people who had significant impacts on the world through development of science and technology. Each classroom has a timeline and we use these to refer to significant dates across all lessons.
Our children learn about the interconnectivity of history through oracy sessions in each lesson. Children are invited to compare historical events or respond to a question such as ‘Would you rather have been a child in 800AD or 1666AD?’
We believe our children will be:
- Be excited by history and therefore encouraging them to undertake new life experiences now and in the future.
- Have a solid foundation of the past and how to interpret sources to develop understanding by questioning.
- What happened?
- Where did it happen?
- Why did it happen?
- Who produced the artefact?
- What was the artefact used for?
- Develop the historical knowledge, skills and vocabulary to help them understand significant historical events and their impact today.
- Develop enquiry skills to become historians.
- Have the ability to express well-balanced opinions, rooted in very good knowledge and understanding about current issues in the world with supported evidence from the past.
- Prepared to become competent historians in secondary education and for life as an adult in the wider world.
