We follow the National Curriculum for geography at Seven Sisters which states that, a high-quality geography education should inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Teaching should equip pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments, together with a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes.
In EYFS
Understanding the world involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community through opportunities to explore, observe and find out about people, places, technology and the environment. Children will broaden their geographical vocabulary by talking about their local area and going on field trips to local parks and amenities. Children will talk about weather and seasons and discuss their home countries and places they have visited.
In Key Stage 1
Pupils should develop knowledge about the world, the United Kingdom and their locality. They should understand basic subject-specific vocabulary relating to human and physical geography and begin to use geographical skills, including first-hand observation, to enhance their locational awareness. Pupils are taught to name and locate the world’s seven continents and five oceans and to name, locate and identify characteristics of the four countries and capital cities of the United Kingdom and its surrounding seas. Children look at the geographical differences between the UK and a region in Europe. Children also study climates around the globe and are exposed to a large range of geographical vocabulary required to understand the world around them. Throughout their curriculum, they familiarise themselves with a variety of maps and atlases.
In Key Stage 2
Pupils will build on their knowledge and understanding beyond the local area to include the United Kingdom and Europe, North and South America. This will include the location and characteristics of a range of the world’s most significant human and physical features. They should develop their use of geographical knowledge, understanding and skills to enhance their locational and place knowledge. They will study physical and human geography in more detail. Map work will again be central to their locational knowledge and they will use fieldwork to observe, measure, record and present the human and physical features in the local area using a range of methods, including sketch maps, plans and graphs, and digital technologies.
Thanks to our partners at HEP, we are able to provide a Key Stage 2 Geography curriculum that is ambitiously broad in scope, meticulous in rigour, highly coherent and very carefully sequenced. The substantive content is taught with ‘high-leverage’ activities, so that pupils think hard about the substance itself, so that they assimilate and retain material efficiently and so that they gain confidence from their fluency in foundational concepts, terms and reference points. In this way vocabulary will become extremely secure, with the range of vocabulary that pupils recognise growing all the time and creating resonance as pupils’ encounter it again and again, both consolidating that vocabulary and freeing up memory space for pupils to make sense of new material. We want our students to understand what the job of a geographer is and to think like geographers. Therefore, in studying geography as a discipline our pupils will:
Each unit of work builds on from the last and they result in the constant practice of various skills specific to the subject of Geography. The vocabulary is the core and children acquire powerful knowledge which enables them to become more knowledgeable more quickly.
To read more about our exciting HEP primary curriculum and the rationale behind it, please click here.
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