Rationale:

At Burradon, our geography teaching aims to deliver a high-quality education where children are inspired, curious and enthused to find out about the physical and human world.  

Our curriculum incorporates all of our school values: 

Be curious about the world around you, ask questions and investigate.

Care and respect yourself, other people, our school and the wider world

  At the heart of the community

Intent:

• To stimulate the children’s curiosity in their surroundings and develop a knowledge and understanding of the physical and human processes which shape places.
• To make sense of their own surroundings through learning about their own locality and the interaction between people and the environment.
• To increase children’s knowledge of other cultures and, in so doing, teach a respect and understanding of what it means to be a positive citizen in a multicultural country.
• To provide learning opportunities that enthuse, engage, and motivate children to learn and foster a sense of curiosity and respect of the world around them.

• To enable children to know and understand environmental problems at a local, regional and global level.
• To encourage in children a commitment to sustainable development and an appreciation of what ‘global citizenship’ means.
• To develop a variety of other skills, including those of enquiry, problem solving, computing, investigation and how to present their conclusions in the most appropriate way.
• To develop the geographical skills, including how to use, draw and interpret maps of different scales, and the vocabulary necessary to carry out effective geographical enquiry.

Implementation:

To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in geography we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school, from EYFS to Year 6. Geography is taught on a half termly basis focusing on the knowledge and skills from the National Curriculum.

We encourage the children to be curious geographers within their learning. At the beginning of  every new topic children ask questions which they would like answered, these then drive the direction of the class teacher’s planning or the child’s independent research.

Our children are given the opportunity to be active in their learning as much as possible. This may include using our woodland area or walking around the local village to more in depth studies away from the local area. We aim to provide our children with a range of geographical experiences which is enhanced by the opportunity of a week-long residential to High Borrans in the Lake District.

What do our children think of Geography?

Year 1: 

Year 2: Geography teaches you about different things.

Year 3:  I like learning about different countries and finding them on maps.

Year 4: Learning about earthquakes and the USA was interesting and fun. We watched videos of the Nepal                  earthquake.

Year 5: I liked learning about volcanoes because it was linked with our learning about earthquakes and                        plate tectonics in Year 4 and I understood it.

Year 6: I really enjoy Geography. I like learning about the Earth and how we can stop pollution.