Geography

We teach History and Geography as individual subjects. Our ‘Units of Work’ in each subject have been carefully crafted by expert teachers, identifying composite tasks and breaking them down in to component tasks to ensure sequential, layered knowledge acquisition. These ‘Units of Work’ also support our particular style of teaching. The children use ‘Knowledge Organisers’ to help them to remember key information related to those subjects and take part in a wide variety of out of school visits to places of historical or geographical interest linked to their learning. Our children experience a range of trips to enhance and develop their geographical skills and knowledge.

Our geography curriculum begins close to home, and gradually broadens out into the wider world. As children progress through the school they will look further and further afield, as well as looking in greater depth at their local area. They are given opportunities to develop their comparative and analytical skills, and provided with a foundation of factual knowledge about the UK, Europe and the wider world.

As well as developing key skills, Geography teaching provides our children with a greater insight into their world. Studying other cultures helps put their own lives into a more global context. By viewing the differences between life in London and elsewhere in the world, children are also able to pinpoint the similarities and connections between different cultures.

Early Years: In our Early Years classes, Geography is developed through the children’s Understanding of the World topics and through their interaction with their family members, friends and wider community.

In Key Stages 1 and 2 we teach blocked units; each class completes three per year.

Key Stage 1: Children are encouraged to use maps, atlases and globes to locate the UK’s four countries and capital cities. Children also locate the world’s seven continents and five oceans. They investigate geographical similarities and differences through studying the human and physical geography of a small area of the United Kingdom and then contrast it to that of a non-European country.

Key Stage 2: Children identify the key features of an area (including hills, mountains, coasts and rivers), research land-use patterns and find out how some of these aspects have changed over time. They learn about the position and significance of latitude, longitude, the equator and the Prime/Greenwich Meridian time zones (including day and night). They also learn about the northern and southern hemispheres, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and the Arctic and Antarctic Circles.