History

Intent 

To help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. To help pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time.

Implementation 

• Teaching

Teachers use flexible groupings during lessons e.g. ability and mixed ability groups, paired work, guided and independent work and whole class work. The children are given opportunities to develop core literacy skills which are exploited through geographical inquiries as well as through the learning of new vocabulary. A range of resources are used to enhance learning including using a variety of slides, maps, atlases, globes, watching videos and reading information texts. Relevant vocabulary is explicitly taught and is evident in the classroom on a History display wall. AFL is used within each lesson to establish next steps for pupils and mini ‘quizzes’ take place to ensure content is being learnt

• EYFS

Past and Present involves the children commenting on images of familiar situations in the past, comparing and contrasting characters from stories, including figures from the past. Children learn about some similarities and differences between things in the past and now, drawing on their experiences and what has been read in class. The children understand the past through settings, characters and events encountered in books read in class and storytelling.

People, Culture and Communities involves children starting to make sense of their own life story and their family’s history. The children also learn about different occupations and explore how things work.

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 People and Communities: Children talk about past and present events in their own lives and in the lives of family members. They know about similarities and differences between themselves and others, and among families, communities and traditions.

• Key Stage 1

Children will learn how to look for similarities and differences between life today and in the past and use common words associated with the passing of time. They will study the lives and lifestyles of significant individuals in the recent past such as Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria as well as Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale. They will learn about events in the more distant past, including those from British history such as The Great Fire of London. They will talk and write about things that happened and why people acted as they did. Pupils will find out about the past using different sources of information and representations.

• Key Stage 2

In Key Stage 2 we use the Opening Worlds Curriculum which has been used and proven very effective in many other schools throughout the country.  In the curriculum, the stories of the past, and the giant ‘stories’ that they weave together, double up as the natural story of the curriculum. By learning history in a broadly chronological way, the earlier content naturally helps the children to learn the later content. Through the build-up of knowledge, over time, the pupils continually expand and build on their vocabulary. This in turn, feeds into subsequent topics and other areas of the curriculum. The overall goal is an extremely broad, thorough, diverse and coherent knowledge, so that by the end of their schooling, all pupils can orient themselves in the world.  The curriculum is systematic about teasing out the stories, vocabulary and ideas, not merely by random quizzing and retrieval practice but by revisiting them re-using them and practising them, in natural narrative contexts.

In Key stage 2, the pupils build on the skills and knowledge from Key stage 1. They will use the concepts of continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, in order to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses. Pupils practise the methods of historical enquiry, understand how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed.

 

Impact 

Children will leave St. Andrew’s School with the following historical skills:

• Chronological knowledge of world events and how events and cultures link together 
• A broad vocabulary of historical terms
• Understand similarities and differences between ways of life in different periods
• Historical skills such as evaluation, creativity, problem solving and enquiry

 The impact of our History curriculum is measured in a variety of ways:

• questioning during lesson time
• marking children’s written work
• interviewing pupils across the school about their learning
• book looks