Curriculum coverage

We believe that our geography curriculum will provide opportunities for learners to understand more about the world, the challenges it faces and their place within it. Learners will be encouraged to engage critically in real-world issues, to enhance their moral and intellectual capabilities and to grow as independent thinkers. We have designed our curriculum using the National Curriculum framework to ensure coverage of locational knowledge, place knowledge, geographical fieldwork and skills and human and physical geography.

Geographical Vocabulary:

Geographical vocabulary is progressive throughout our curriculum.

(See document Below)

Curriculum progression:

Our geography curriculum comprises of four interrelated strands of knowledge:

Procedural Knowledge:

Procedural knowledge represents the skills of a geographer. This knowledge is drawn from the National Curriculum programmes of study and is organised into a vertically integrated progression so that children revisit and deepen their knowledge and understanding in each year group as they move through school. This knowledge is integrated through our learning points and increases in complexity within each year group.

 Disciplinary Knowledge:

There is not a commonly held view on what disciplinary knowledge represents within geography. We believe that disciplinary knowledge represents the ways in which the substance of geography is understood, organised, debated and generated.

Disciplinary knowledge is represented by concepts that underlie a geographical way of investigating and understanding the world. We use key concepts which help us to frame the unique contribution of geography as a discipline. We have identified what it means to think geographically.

Key Concepts:

Substantive knowledge:

We have devised a curriculum which sets out the substantive knowledge students will learn throughout their time at West Meadows. This is presented as ‘learning points’ – the content we want the pupils to know and remember. We have made specific choices using our curriculum drivers (language, possibilities and diversity) to establish a curriculum which is language rich, promotes diversity and increases possibilities for our students to be successful geographers.

(see whole school curriculum document)

Repetition and retrieval:

Throughout our curriculum, the procedural and disciplinary knowledge is revisited in every year group to ensure our pupils can do more and remember more as they progress throughout school. Repeating this enables our pupils to apply the skills and conceptual frameworks of geographers with increasing levels of independence by the end of key stage 2.

Retrieval practice is built into each lesson and creates opportunities for students to ensure that the key knowledge set out in our ‘learning points’ is revisited and remembered. Long-term retrieval opportunities are planned out for students in each curriculum theme by revisiting the relevant previous learning (from previous years) at the beginning of new learning; ensuring that it is further embedded in long-term memory.

Assessment:

We encourage children to think like geographers, work like geographers and then apply their geographical knowledge. We assess their application of knowledge with a final assessment at the end of each geographical theme. We do this through a well thought out, progressive and structured composite task question. This provides us information on the children’s ability to use a combination of substantive, disciplinary and procedural knowledge and provides opportunities to apply previous knowledge from other units of study and year groups.

 

Vocab progression document

Geography At A Glance Overview

West Meadows Geography Sequence of Learning Concepts