Geography

From September 2023, we have adopted the Opening Worlds humanities curriculum for History, Geography and RE.  

Opening Worlds curriculum and its associated teaching approaches will secure the highest possible quality of education for pupils. This is because the curriculum ensures that the subjects reflect the wide reference and academic practices, outside of school, to which they refer. In addition, the material is organised so that pupils use earlier material to access to later material and so that pupils start to see how everything connects within a subject.

Opening Worlds has strongly recommended that the material is taught in sequence because each part makes the next part much more understandable.  Numerous words that are explicitly taught and practised in Year 3 are then taken for granted in lessons in Year 4-6.  If children do not have the secure knowledge of the content and vocabulary of the Year 3 curriculum this is likely to slow progress and limit enjoyment.

All key stage 2 children have, therefore, started with the Year 3 Opening Worlds curriculum.  As a result of moving from the school’s previous curriculum to Opening Worlds, the school has identified a small number of content gaps.  These have been noted and will be addressed through our choice of books that are used in English and read to children.

Our rationale and curriculum intent

At Oldmixon Primary School, we are committed to ensuring that knowledge is learned carefully, methodically and in a well sequenced manner in order for children to develop Geographical knowledge and skills.

In KS1, the focus for our Geography curriculum is for children to begin their journey as a Geographer by learning about their locality. Following this, children will learn about their country and the world in which they live in, their place within it and their impact on it. In year 1 and year 2, the focus will be on children developing their map skills and exploring the concepts of human and physical Geography.

In KS2, as part of our Opening World curriculum, our coherent and well-sequenced curriculum ensures that material is organised so that children use earlier material to access later material so that children see connections within and between subjects. The curriculum is ambitiously broad in scope, meticulous in rigour, highly coherent and carefully sequenced so that children are able to understand new content, arrive with curiosity and recognise a wide range of technical vocabulary. Through powerful storytelling, explicit vocabulary teaching and retrieval, children will engage in geographical reasoning about change, diversity across space and interaction between places, phenomena and processes around the world, they will collect, analyse, record and interpret geographical data and learn skills of geographical enquiry including fieldwork, they will interpret a range of sources of geographical information including maps, diagrams, globes and photographs and they will communicate geographical information in a variety of ways including through maps, numerical and quantitative skills and writing at length.

Children in year 3 recreated river systems in their Geography lesson.

Here are some pictures of our children enjoying their Geography lessons!