Humanities

At Queen Elizabeth’s Primary school, our Humanities curriculum aims to create pupils who are inquisitive about the world around them. We have developed a skills-based curriculum which enables pupils to transfer their knowledge and understanding to new learning in Humanities and other areas of the curriculum.  We want our pupils to become historical and geographical experts as they embark on their learning in these subjects. This is achieved through developing substantive (subject and specific vocabulary knowledge) and disciplinary (using investigative skills to find out about the past and the world around them to think like a historian and a geographer) concepts.

Our History curriculum offers children a coherent knowledge and understanding of the past; it provides children with opportunities to look at and handle artefacts and to ask questions about what the past was like.  From EYFS to Year 6, children look at progressive timelines, placing themselves within this to gain an understanding about the previous periods of time and the changes that have occurred which supports their understanding of chronology. The curriculum has been designed to provide children with knowledge and understanding about the history of the United Kingdom, including our local area, and that of the wider world. Pupils study the cause and effect of significant events within various time periods and are able to make comparisons. We intend to create children who are inquisitive about the past and who understand that each era is different from the next, whilst building their understanding of society.

Our Geography curriculum focuses on map work and locational knowledge, providing children with a strong sense of the world around them and their place within this. Beginning in EYFS, children learn about our school and the world around them. Each year this knowledge is built upon, enabling pupils to study different areas of the world. Pupils begin lessons with practical mapping activities which support children in securing their understanding of place and locational knowledge. Each year group study and create specific maps thus enabling children to apply their geographical knowledge widely.

Physical and Human Geography are widely discussed, as is the impact of human activity on the world. Children learn about the Earth’s natural resources and natural geographical phenomena such as earthquakes and volcanoes. Local area fieldwork is used to put much of the geographical knowledge into context, and children look at the geography of the local in KS1 and it is revisited in Ks2. Through our Geography curriculum, we intend to develop children’s curiosity about the world around them; who want to find out where things are, why they are there and how they change over time.