Geography

At Ladysmith Junior School, we recognise that our children will be living in a world with vastly changing landscapes, peoples and climates. When studying Geography, we want our children to recognise, explore and understand, with increasing accuracy, the world around them, and the processes and skills required to become competent geographers. Our curriculum, supported by Connect Geography, enables our children to develop their substantive knowledge alongside disciplinary knowledge. Our curriculum is aspirational, and instils in our pupils a desire to achieve the highest levels of success, through providing them with opportunities to excel by acquiring long lasting knowledge, understanding and mastery of core geographical skills.

Our curriculum is sequenced logically, and it is relevant, broad and balanced to ensure pupils can build on previous knowledge and understanding as they tackle more complex and demanding enquiries These enquiries are progressively more challenging in terms of the subject knowledge we want our pupils to acquire and the critical thinking skills. They are relevant to our school context and afford the children opportunities to develop diagonal thinking across multiple subjects and disciplines.

Our curriculum is inclusive in terms of delivering the same curriculum to all of our pupils irrespective of specific learning needs or disabilities.

We adopt an enquiry focused approach to learning and teaching in geography which develops our pupils as young geographers. Through enquiry our pupils not only build subject knowledge and understanding but become increasingly adept at critical thinking, specialised vocabulary and their grasp of subject concepts. Geography is taught through ‘big question’ led enquiries about relevant geographical topics, places and themes. Our curriculum is therefore ‘knowledge rich’. These ‘big questions’ are supplemented with smaller questions throughout the unit. This enables the children to incrementally build a broader understanding related to the ‘big’ question. We adopt a policy of immersive learning in geography that provides sufficient time and space for our pupils not only to acquire new knowledge and subject vocabulary but also to develop subject concepts and understand the significance of what they have learned.

Children are given the opportunity to demonstrate any prior knowledge at the beginning of the unit before completing a post unit Justification of Opinion task to draw together and present a response to the overarching question. Our children will have a thorough understanding of the geographical concepts needed to do this.