Rationale

As historians, children will learn lessons from history to influence the decisions they make in their lives in the future.  As part of our school ethos, we aim to inspire our children and encourage their skills of enquiry whilst nurturing their curiosity about their local area and the world around them. We aim to broaden our children’s horizons to better understand the world in the context of history. We do this through our Knowledge of the World driver and our topic based learning. Emphasis is placed on analytical thinking and questioning and children demonstrate a coherent knowledge and understanding of the subject.

Aims

• know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world
• know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies; achievements and follies of mankind
• gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’
• understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses
• understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed History – key stages 1 and 2
• gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales

How the subject is taught:

History is taught through a topic based approach with children learning between one and two different topics each year, threaded throughout our curriculum as well as through our Knowledge of the World driver.

If you walk into a History lesson, you will see:

• Pupils learning to select, organise and integrate new knowledge with prior learning
• Sequential lessons developing children’s understanding of specific historical vocabulary.
• Pupils revisiting prior learning in our Knowledge of the World driver to consolidate understanding.
• Children forming their own lines of enquiry within topics to guide their own learning
• Children using primary and secondary sources of information to feed their curiosity about what they are learning
• Children developing their understanding and tolerance through the study of key historical events.

If you have any further enquiries about History in our school, please contact Miss Sarah Baddeley.