At Holy Trinity and St Silas, our main focus within the geography curriculum is to foster curiosity, promote and deepen geographical knowledge, skills, and understanding, and nurture a sense of responsibility and care towards the environment.
Our geography curriculum supports children to be:
Caring Citizens (care):
- Contrasting localities are chosen to reflect the diversity of our community, enabling pupils to see themselves within the geography curriculum (mirrors) whilst also considering the lives of others (windows). This supports children to become knowledgeable, tolerant, caring world citizens.
- Children develop an understanding of the importance of caring for the world through sustainability, learning about the environmental impact of human and physical geography within key units such as Brazil, Rivers and Tectonics.
- The curriculum supports children to appreciate the work within our local community by engaging in fieldtrips linked to termly topics. Fieldtrips within the local area support children to value and care for their locality of Camden and understand the impact they can have.
- Children are taught to care for people, places and cultures through geographical skills and knowledge (place, locational and physical and human geography).
- Lessons are contextualised to make them purposeful, ensuring that children understand the relevance of the geography curriculum and how it can explain and impact the world around them.
- Children are encouraged to develop their own identity and place in the world, empowering them through work on global issues, giving them the knowledge, skills and agency to act upon injustices and tackle the status-quo.
Courageous Communicators (courage):
- Through the teaching of subject-specific technical vocabulary and opportunities for focussed talk during lessons, children develop their ability to speculate, make connections and interpret evidence to develop their understanding about the world and its people.
- A range of oracy activities and techniques are used to ensure that key geographical vocabulary is learnt by all children so they are able to clearly articulate geographical knowledge and points of view during debate or class discussion.
- Lessons support children to suggest and respond to geographical questions, using a range of key vocabulary in order to explain, debate and justify. They will be able to use a range of primary and secondary geographical sources to help inform and draw conclusions.
- Children are taught to communicate geographical information in a variety of ways, including maps, numerical and quantitative data and written and verbal communication.
- Children are supported to share their own feelings about what may be happening in the world, what change they would like to see and how they can help achieve this.
- Geography aims to create a sense of action and advocacy in children by understanding the relationship between physical and human processes. Children will start to appreciate the necessity to enact change.
Cooperative Learners (cooperation):
- Children are taught to understand their role within paired and group work and given opportunities in lessons to develop their cooperation skills
- Children are provided with opportunities to cooperate with each other in order to carry out fieldwork and enquiry, working together to communicate and express their findings or data. These memorable learning experiences give the children a sense of scale, locality and the world around them by using London as their classroom.
