Geography

Our aim at Chadsmead Academy is to inspire children’s curiosity, interest and appreciation for the world that we live in. As they progress through the curriculum, our pupils will accumulate properly embedded, sequenced knowledge and skills that help them understand how the world works, how places are connected to each other and to ‘think like a geographer’.

To ‘think like a geographer’ children will:

· Ask geographical questions

· Acquire geographical information

· Organise and present geographical information

· Analyse geographical information

· Answer geographical questions

From Year 1 to Year 6, we have designed our planning around the National Curriculum’s 4 key areas:

· Locational Knowledge – finding the location of places using maps, involving the use of: latitude and longitude, map symbols and different scales.

· Place Knowledge – understanding the geographical similarities and differences between countries.

· Human and Physical Geography – exploring physical geography such as weather patterns, rivers, mountains and volcanoes and human geography such as settlements, land use and distribution of natural resources.

· Geographical Skills and Fieldwork – using compass directions and grid references two develop knowledge of places, using aerial photographs and plan perspectives, using fieldwork and observation to study the school grounds and local area and presenting findings.

We use these to carefully design and structure our enquiry-led units of work where children investigate questions such as ‘Why do we like to be beside the seaside?’ and ‘Why do people choose to live near volcanoes?’.

The curriculum is progressive, including substantive knowledge (content that is established fact), concepts and skills that pupils must learn to support their later learning. Certain content is repeated and built upon throughout so that pupils can encounter it more than once, in different contexts and secure this in their long term memory.