St Anne's Catholic Primary School

The Geography Curriculum is designed by the co-ordinator, management team and governors to allow pupils to transfer key knowledge to their long-term memory. At St. Anne’s, our Geography curriculum is designed to develop children’s cultural capital by delving into children’s curiosity and fascination about the world and its people, that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Children investigate a range of places – both in Britain and throughout the world – to help develop their knowledge and understanding of the Earth’s physical and human processes. We are committed to providing children with opportunities to investigate and make enquiries about their local area of Basingstoke, so that they can develop a real sense of who they are, their heritage and what makes our local area unique and special to ensure breadth, balance, continuity and progression. This results in building new skills and knowledge based upon what has been taught before, allowing all pupils to work towards clearly defined end points. We develop children’s experiences and understanding of geography by igniting their curiosity about diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments, together with a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes through memorable learning opportunities for example, the post office, the Gilbert White Field Study Centre, Marwell and Birdworld. The school provides a coherently planned curriculum, sequenced towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge, skills and cultural capital through informative teaching and learning activities and enhancement experiences.

We therefore intend that all pupils will:

• Develop contextual knowledge of the location of globally significant places including their defining physical and human characteristics and how these provide a geographical context for understanding the actions of processes.
• Understand the processes that give rise to key physical and human geographical features of the world, to develop a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which places are interdependent and interconnected.
• Learn the skills to collect, analyse and communicate with a range of data gathered through experiences of fieldwork by using a wide range of sources of geographical information, including maps, diagrams, globes and aerial photographs.
• Learn to communicate geographical information in a variety of ways, including through maps, numerical/quantitative skills and writing at length.
• Learn about events and individuals in their local area and how these have shaped the environment around them.
• Develop the ability to focus, learn and use appropriate and accurate geographical vocabulary, which develops, evolves and is built upon throughout the year groups.
• Read a variety of different books to promote over-learning and the development of pre-skills. Alongside this, children are encouraged to read a variety of sources and critically analyse them e.g. non-fictions texts, maps, atlas etc… to develop understanding of concepts and geographical knowledge to embed learning in the long-term memory.
• Build in memorable experiences to promote deep learning.