Aims

History is all around us. It can help children to make sense of the world in which they live in and can help them to develop a sense of identity. Our aim is that children should understand that the society in which we live has been shaped by developments of the past. 

We believe in promoting local history throughout the curriculum to ensure it is bespoke for our pupils in our school. For example, links have been made to Ashford dating back to the Saxon times and the history of our own school during the Victorian Era. 

We aim to inspire children’s curiosity about the past and recreate it through drama, dance and music. Children will ask questions, think critically, weigh evidence, discuss arguments, develop perspective and judgement. Through the teaching of History we endeavour to teach pupils to understand about people’s lives, including those of the present, the processes of change and diversities of societies and beliefs, whilst celebrating these differences.

The coverage of some history in Key Stage 1 enables children to acquire an understanding of time, events and people within their own living memory as well as their grandparents' memories.

The coverage in Key Stage 2 is that children work in chronological order from year 3 to year 6 on the core British history study units taken from the National Curriculum, starting with Stone Age to Iron Age in Year 3 and then progressing onto more modern history in Year 6 with World War 2 unit.  This is repeated for ancient history, starting with Ancient Egypt in Year 3, moving to Ancient Greeks in Year 5 and the The Mayans in Year 6. The aim is for children to truly develop and embed a sense of time, understand how civilisations were interconnected and to be exposed to a diverse range of history topics. Children start to understand how some historical events occurred concurrently in different locations e.g. when the Ancient Egyptians were around, in Britain we were hunters and gatherers. 

 Implementation

Our History curriculum follows an enquiry based approach and each unit poses an historical question to spark curiosity in our children and encourage them to discover and begin to ask their own questions.

We broadly follow the Challenge Curriculum from Focus Education but each unit has been adapted to suit the needs of our children in our school. Each unit starts by linking learning to prior knowledge - ‘What do I already know about this topic?’ and builds on this, as children work through a sequence of key learning points in each unit. Within each unit we follow the journey of ‘Link it’, ‘Learn it’, ‘Check it’, ‘Show it’, ‘Know it’ (Make it stick) to ensure children are linking to previous learning, learning key pieces of new knowledge, demonstrating their understanding and then rehearsing skills and revisiting knowledge in order to reinforce this new learning and ensure children know and remember more with each unit they explore.

We have key identified vocabulary in each unit and encourage the use of this when talking or writing. Children are able to develop this knowledge and explore ideas further by using historical sources of evidence.

We try to make history lessons as practical and hands-on as possible to allow children to reach their own conclusions. We encourage a high level of presentation with a varied range of ways to present findings or learning points to ensure this knowledge sticks.

We ensure there are a number of retrieval opportunities throughout the term to revisit previous learning to see what we can remember to support us in bringing to mind these previous learning points and cement them further in our long term memory. Through revisiting and consolidating skills, our lessons and resources help children build up prior knowledge alongside introducing new skills and challenge. 

 Impact

The impact of History teaching will be assessed in a variety of ways e.g. pupil voice, books and retrieval practice to ensure that children have met and understood the expectations for each unit they have covered. Through high quality teaching, our children will develop a good understanding of historical concepts and knowledge.

By the time children leave our school, our aim is that they should have developed:

•  A secure knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from the historical period covered. 
• The ability to think critically about history and communicate confidently in styles appropriate to a range of audiences. 
• The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate from the past, forming and refining questions and lines of enquiry.
• Curiosity and enthusiastic engagement in their learning.
• A respect for historical evidence and the ability to critically evaluate the use of it to support their explanations and judgements.
• A desire to embrace challenging activities, showing resilience and confidence across a range of history topics. 

History Curriculum Overview