Geography
Geography Curriculum at Smallwood
At Smallwood, we provide a broad and balanced curriculum throughout the whole school, making use of our local area and its features, progressively developing key geographical skills and studying a range of diverse localities. We pride ourselves on the passionate delivery of geography, sharing our enthusiasm with the children and inspiring them to want to learn more about their world.
We want children to leave Smallwood with a strong sense of identity and recognise themselves as citizens of their local community, Britain, Europe and as global citizens too. We aim to foster a genuine curiosity about the world around them through thought-provoking questions and stimuli that develop their critical thinking skills. We recognise the language barriers for many of our learners and therefore design lessons to maximise practical, hands-on experiences and opportunities to engage with a range of resources, such as maps, atlases, apps and ICT software, globes, information texts, photographs, recordings, projects and fieldwork apparatus. Children are encouraged to investigate current local and global issues through pupil committees in order to support them in making cultural, political, economic, religious and social links with their geography studied in class.
“A high-quality geography education should inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Teaching should equip pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments, together with a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes. As pupils progress, their growing knowledge about the world should help them to deepen their understanding of the interaction between physical and human processes, and of the formation and use of landscapes and environments. Geographical knowledge, understanding and skills provide the frameworks and approaches that explain how the Earth’s features at different scales are shaped, interconnected and change over time.”
National Curriculum, 2014
The national curriculum for geography aims to ensure that all pupils:
- develop contextual knowledge of the location of globally significant places - including their defining physical and human characteristics and how these provide a geographical context for understanding the actions of processes
- understand the processes that give rise to key physical and human geographical features of the world, how these are interdependent and how they bring about spatial variation and change over time
- are competent in the geographical skills needed to: collect, analyse and communicate with a range of data gathered through experiences of fieldwork that deepen their understanding of geographical processes
- interpret a range of sources of geographical information, including maps, diagrams, globes, aerial photographs and Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
- communicate geographical information in a variety of ways, including through maps, numerical and quantitative skills and writing at length.