Within our Geography curriculum, children across the school focus on four key areas of Geographical knowledge and skills: place knowledge, locational knowledge, human & physical geography, and fieldwork.
In Key Stage 1 children start with their Geography learning journey with the immediate world around them: the local area. The exploration through fieldwork and taught Geographical skills, helps them develop their sense of human and physical geographical features. This continues when looking at the United Kingdom in the next topic, developing the scale of area they are applying their learnt geographical skills to. Following on from this, children look at the diverse country of Kenya, understanding then the wider world around them. This is supported using maps (both digital and physical), atlases and globes, simple compass directions, aerial photographs, and plans, as well as simple fieldwork and observational skills.
Within Key Stage 2 the area of learning is scaled up again, focussing on continents such as Europe and Asia, developing a further sense of scale. This is furthered by locational knowledge of longitude, latitude, and different time zones and how that effects the world around them. Children use maps to focus on these areas, understanding the different environments that are within the wider world. Comparisons will begin to be made between different areas of the world, identifying geographical similarities and differences of the contrasting countries or continents as part of the place knowledge element of our curriculum. Within human and physical geography children will be taught to describe and understand key aspects of geography, for example: climate zones, rivers, mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, the water cycle, types of settlement, economic activity, and the distribution of natural resources. Fieldwork and map skills within our units, allows children to practically apply their geographical knowledge and explore local environments asking questions about the world around them such as – ‘What sort of settlement do I live in?’.
Our lessons are scaffolded to support and allow children to access the learning, ensuring that vocabulary is at the forefront of our lessons and children understand the geographical vocabulary in the lessons. The differentiation in our lessons enables the curriculum to set a high ceiling, pushing children to be their best.