History

OUR AIMS

We want our pupils to:

• Respect themselves, respect others, respect all property, and respect their community and the World around them.
• Have a positive attitude that encourages self-belief and confidence
• Achieve high standards in all areas of the curriculum.
• Respond to challenges and seize new experiences whole–heartedly.
• Take an active lead in their own learning and development throughout their life.
• Develop the spirit of enquiry leading to life-long learning.

OUR VISION FOR THIS SUBJECT

At Cheswick Green Primary, we want all of our pupils to have an understanding of the past and how history will shape their future. We believe that high quality history lessons encourage children to ask critical questions and enables them to have a better understanding of the society in which they live. Above all we want our pupils to be passionate about history.

HISTORY CURRICULUM INTENT  

At Cheswick Green, we aim to implement a strong History Curriculum, which develops and builds upon children’s prior knowledge. We want to inspire curiosity and a love of discovery, to help the children develop their knowledge of British History, while also celebrating and learning about the diversity of the wider world. Children will develop a range of methods for historical enquiry while learning about Historical moments within their living memory and beyond. Building on from prior learning, the children will then go on to learn about ancient civilisations, cultures and significant Historical figures, in a way that is immersive, challenging and encourages active learning and investigation. We want to create a love of History in all our children, and we aim to do this through range of learning opportunities in and out of class.

HISTORY CURRICULUM IMPLEMENTATION

In our teaching of History, we will employ a range of teaching styles and opportunities in order to engage and inspire our children to develop knowledge, skills and understanding. These Working together to be the best that we can be opportunities will include individual, partner and group activities and will involve the use of high-quality.

• Each topic will be opened to ascertain children’s prior knowledge and identify areas that they wish to learn more about
• History will be linked to the history of the local area where possible to establish and promote a positive sense of identity and community
• Discussion will form a key part of lessons and assigned tasks
• High emphasis on talking strategies
• Clear explanations of the relevance/importance of each topic area
• Use of practical activities to reinforce and ‘bring to life’ Historical concepts
• Fieldwork opportunities (relative to Key Stage)
• Exploration of diversity (where possible) in order to understand how and why cultural differences are linked to geography
• Provision of research opportunities

In EYFS pupils will explore geographical themes through a child-centred approach based upon the Geography and History of their local environment. Our children will be encouraged to develop a sense of their physical world as well as their community, and provided with opportunities to explore, observe and find out about people, places and the environment around them.

HISTORY CURRICULUM IMPACT

At Cheswick Green, we strive to equip the children with the historical knowledge and skills that will develop their skills and confidence and enable them to continue their future learning, in Key Stage 3, and beyond. We will assess learning through a range of methods, which will include and are not limited to –

• Book scrutiny
• Pupil discussions and feedback
• Planning analysis
• Learning walks.

 EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES IN HISTORY            

Where children have a physical disability or have SEND, we aim to provide resources and learning experiences that will support their learning in history. We do this by setting suitable learning challenges, responding to each child’s different needs and providing learning opportunities that enable all pupils to make progress.

Activities should be carefully planned by the class teacher and be differentiated where appropriate for children with SEN and equally the more able and Gifted and Talented children. All resources/materials have been reviewed with equal opportunities in mind, e.g. race, gender, ethnicity. Learning experiences in history will be available to every child, regardless of race, gender, class or ability. Pupils will be encouraged to value social and cultural diversity through musical experiences. They will listen to, and participate in, a variety of experiences in a positive and constructive role.

INCLUSION

Inclusion is about every child having educational needs, that every child is special and the School is meeting these diverse needs in order to ensure the active participation and progress of all children in their learning.

Inclusive practice in History should enable all children to achieve their best possible standard; whatever their ability, and irrespective of gender, ethnic, social or cultural background, home language or any other aspect that could affect their participation in, or progress in their learning.

We recognise that in all classes, children have a wide range of historical ability, and so we seek to provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child. We achieve this in a variety of ways:

• setting tasks which are open-ended and can have a variety of responses;
• setting tasks of increasing difficulty;
• grouping children by ability and setting different tasks for each group;
• grouping children in mixed ability groups;
• providing resources of different complexity, depending on the ability of the child;
• using classroom assistants to support the work of individuals or groups of children.