Helping children to remember their learning and make links

We want our children to be able to remember what they have been taught and be able to make some basic links with their subsequent learning. With this in mind, teachers carefully plan geography lessons using a range of high-quality strategies:

• Activities that specifically emotionally and intellectually engage our children are planned and delivered for the learning to go deep. For example, follow a string trail supported with a map around the school grounds to develop locational and directional language to describe the features and routes on a map.
• Activities that are practical and enable children to apply their knowledge and understanding. For example, Year 1 children make a ‘treasure island’ shape in the outdoor area using sticks, rope or chalk and add objects before drawing a map of it and creating a key.
• Children are challenged to think and to care so that they can express their personal opinions about human impact on the natural environment.
• For children who find learning more challenging, teachers use a whole range of strategies to help engage them in geography. This is personalised according to the individual needs of the child. When children fall behind, they are quickly brought up to speed by well-trained teaching assistants or timely intervention from their teachers.

The geography curriculum is ambitious and matches the breadth of the national curriculum. Activities are engaging and well planned. Conversations with children show that they are interested in the way geography impacts our lives

Foundation stage

In the Foundation Stage, children learn about their immediate locality so that they know about places in and around our school and school grounds. They have a good understanding of familiar features such as houses, farm and shop buildings as well as a growing knowledge of distant places that they encounter through topics and stories. The children observe and discuss the weather regularly, becoming familiar with types of weather and how it can affect us such as needing coats when it is cold. The children also learn about the different jobs which people do in our community.

Key Stage One

In Key Stage 1, children focus on the local area. They go out in the local area and investigate human and physical geographical features. We are lucky that within a 15 minute walk from school all of these features are available to them and children can name  shops, different types of housing, woodland, stream, bridge, church, town centre, library, fields, roads, paths, street signs, post box,  junior school, primary school, high school, traffic lights and elderly people’s homes.

Children can talk about contrasting distant localities such as Australia, the USA or Spain and other places through stories and topics. They can use globes and maps to identify the countries of the UK and their capital cities. They can make maps and learn from many secondary sources. They can observe and record the weather and changing seasons.

In Year 2, children can contrast a different locality with their own local area. They can make judgements about places saying what they like and don’t like about different localities. They learn about the beaches and their environmental problems. During the year they visit Bridlington, a place on the coast, and contrast the geography of that place with our local area. Maps, atlases and globes are used throughout the year and children develop their skills using these. Children have opportunities to research places using the computer, iPads, books, pictures and photographs.

Our school environment encourages interest in the world around us. We have a floorplan of the school displayed for children to become familiar with. We have a giant UK and world map displayed around our building which children use to increase their knowledge.

Pupils with special educational needs and/or learning disabilities and lower-attaining students made good progress as a result of the good individual support they receive.