Geography

Intent

At Northfields Infants and Nursery School, Geography has a clear learning journey across the whole school. The pupils will learn about their local environment, community as well as the wider world. Geography is taught through topics that are inspiring and aim to develop pupils’ natural curiosity. We want our pupils to develop skills in recognising, describing, explaining, comparing and evaluating human and physical geographical elements with a high level of technical vocabulary being accurately used and applied. We aim to produce independent and evaluative thinkers who have empathy for how others live to develop an awareness, respect and curiosity for different cultures and societies and the physical world around them. Pupils should have the opportunity to ask questions, make links, allowing them to make sense of the world around them. They will have opportunities to work collaboratively and through the use of field work, trips and other experiences. Geography at Northfields is accessible to all learners, regardless of individual starting points. 

Implementation

At Northfields Infants and Nursery School the Geography curriculum is taught through a geographical enquiry approach including many cross-curricular links. The pupils will attempt to answer an overarching enquiry question through a combination of approaches starting with a hook to inspire the pupils. This will enable links to be developed that support the pupils’ own developing, local, national and global knowledge, mindful of diversity and global awareness.

This approach encourages the pupils to become more independent learners, taking responsibility for their own learning. The pupils are encouraged to ask questions and develop their own lines of enquiry, using research skills to facilitate this. We approach learning creatively and understand that there is more than one way to achieve an objective or accomplish a task, in order to make lessons more engaging and accessible to all.

We follow a skills progression in order to ensure curriculum coverage and in order to develop the pupils’ key geographical skills and understanding throughout the school. High quality, up-to-date resources are used to support learning including globes, maps, photographs and atlases – as well as IT resources, in order to also develop pupils’ digital literacy.

Pupils work towards completing a quality outcome at the end of the learning journey to demonstrate their learning. This approach encourages collaborative learning and develops communication skills and resilience. Our school has a clear focus on the development of speech and language and allowing pupils to make links and embed the vocabulary. We use working walls, visual prompts and pre-teach some vocabulary to enable pupils to develop a deeper understanding and apply in different contexts. This also helps pupils to make links and develop their speaking and listening, as well as their writing, across the curriculum.

Impact: progress and attainment

At Northfields Infants and Nursery School we can judge the success of our geography curriculum in the following ways:

• Pupil conferencing – are pupils happy, engaged, motivated to do well, challenged?
• Learning walks (including those with governors and external visitors) –do they show evidence of our intent in action?
• Planning – is it allowing pupils to gain knowledge and master skills, does it meet the needs of all learners? Is it following a geographical enquiry approach starting with a hook?
• Humanities Books – is presentation of a high standard and are all pupils making at least expected progress from their various starting points?
• Data – is attainment and progress at least in line with National averages, do all groups achieve as well as they should? What provisions are in place to support pupils who aren’t making progress?
• Learning environment – is it rich in language to support pupils’ learning, does it support independence?
• Class teachers and the SLT conduct termly pupil progress meetings where performance analysis is linked to triangulated monitoring, measuring performance against individual and school targets.