history

INTENT

Our aim is to provide opportunities for all children to understand, appreciate and enjoy the multi-cultural world in which we live and to celebrate its rich diversity. History at Holgate Primary and Nursery School is taught within ‘Curriculum Vehicles’, with our key Curriculum Drivers being Diversity and Aspiration. This involves us incorporating soft, employable skills. Our local area is utilised to support the teaching of History, such as exploring coal mining - which had a significant impact on our local community.

The History curriculum at Holgate Primary follows the National Curriculum for its content and framework. Key historical concepts of continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity and difference and significance run throughout the curriculum. It is intended to inspire their curiosity to know more about the past and encourage them to ask perceptive questions by providing enriching learning experiences including visits, visitors and artefacts. Children will ‘think like a Historian’ and develop as experts in questioning, thinking critically, weighing evidence and arguments, and gaining perspective and judgement. It will also help children to understand the complexity of people’s lives and the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups.

Through our curriculum design, we also ensure repeated encounters with important ‘key concepts’ which we have selected as a school and refer to each lesson. Examples include power, settlements, living things, innovation and discovery and key events. This is to allow children to draw comparison and make links with prior learning.

Children develop chronological knowledge and knowledge and understanding of our local area, country and the wider world through the teaching of our ‘Vehicles’. The coverage of recent history in KS1 such as ‘Magnificent Me’ and ‘Gruesome Germs’ enables children to acquire an understanding of time, events and people in their memory and their parents’ and grandparents’ memories. The intent in lower KS2 is that children can work in chronological order from the Stone Age to Iron Age and then progress onto the Romans and Anglo Saxons to embed this sequence of chronology. Upper KS2 allows children to repeat and embed this sequence of chronology with a wider selection of ancient history such as Ancient Greece and Ancient Egypt through to more modern history such as World War II.

History knowledge builds progressively over time. For example, when looking at chronological awareness, children in F2 should understand some similarities and differences between things in the past and now using stories or their own experiences, in Year 3 they sequence several events, artefacts or historical figures on a timeline using dates, including those that are sometimes further apart, while in Year 6 they would debate how a historical concept can have both continuity and change and the impact of this on society.

We know some knowledge is particularly important for a particular topic or period studies. We call this ‘sticky knowledge’ and this is what we deem most important for pupils to retain in their long-term memory. We ensure this knowledge is being retained through a series of memory recall activities planned for in History lessons, whether that be looking at learning in the previous lesson, previous ‘vehicle’ or learning from a previous year. ‘Sticky knowledge’ is outlined in our medium-term plan.

IMPLEMENTATION

Our History curriculum:

Fosters an interest and understanding of the past.
Enables children to know about significant events in British and World History.
Develops a sense of chronology.
Helps children understand society and their place within it, so they develop a sense of cultural heritage.
Develops skills of enquiry, investigation, analysis, evaluation, and presentation.

IMPACT

Examples of children’s work and displays demonstrate our intent and implementation for all pupils.

EYFS