History
Intent
At Northfields Infants and Nursery School, History has a clear learning journey across the whole school. Our pupils learn about the history of their local environment, community, and the wider world. History is taught through a Subject based approach that encourages development of both enquiry skills and historical knowledge. We develop pupils to become independent and evaluative thinkers who have empathy for how others lived. This will develop an awareness, respect and curiosity for different cultures and societies and the past. Pupils will have the opportunity to ask questions, conduct their own research and work collaboratively and using field work, trips, and other experiences. History is accessible to all learners, regardless of individual starting points.
Implementation
At Northfields Infants and Nursery School History is taught as part of a two-year cycle curriculum; an enquiry approach including many cross-curricular links. In each year, three of the topics focus primarily on History. The pupils will answer an overarching enquiry question throughout the learning journey through a combination of approaches. Our 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, to make lessons more engaging and accessible to all.
High quality, up-to-date resources are used to support learning including books, historical maps, photographs, internet and artefacts. Artefacts are sourced by the school for each topic and are used throughout the enquiry to support understanding and develop Historical Enquiry skills.
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. This is further embedded through cross-curricular links, for example the use of English within the learning journey teaches pupils how to express their ideas through writing and respect ideas that are different from their own.
The subject leader will support other teaching staff by implementing staff training. These will focus on areas identified as needed based on the results of a staff confidence survey, book monitoring and learning walks.
Every unit of History work across the school includes a trip, visitor to the school or an experience day. These opportunities strongly support the pupils’ learning in the classroom, allows them to experience more of the outside world both within and beyond their local area and imbues them with a strong set of practical, social and emotional life skills.
Our school has a clear focus on the development of speech and language. We have implemented tiered vocabulary development throughout the curriculum and use working walls, visual prompts and pre-teach vocabulary. This helps pupils to make links and develop their speaking and listening, as well as their writing across the curriculum.
Impact
At Northfields Infants and Nursery School we can judge the success of our History curriculum in the following ways:
- Lesson observations will show that all pupils are motivated and engaged and can access the tasks. Pupils will take ownership of their learning by raising questions and conducting their own research.
- Book scrutiny will show pupil’s learning to be of a high standard and will evidence that all pupils have made progress from their individual starting points, in line with the History skills progression used throughout the school.
- Through pupil conferencing, pupils will be able to articulate what they have learnt, which skills they have used and which aspects of the project they have enjoyed.
