History Curriculum Statement

 

Acorn History

Empowering Learners...Growing Minds

 

We aim to...

Empowering Learners

• Our intention at Kidsgrove Primary School is for children to develop a passion for history and an enthusiastic engagement in learning. This will develop their sense of curiosity about the past and their understanding of how and why people interpret the past in different ways.
• A desire to embrace challenging activities including opportunities to undertake high quality research across a range of history topics.
• The ability to think, reflect, debate and discuss and evaluate events from the past, formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry.

Growing Minds

• An excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from a range of historical periods and of historical concepts and processes.
• The ability to think critically about history and communicate ideas very confidently in styles appropriate to a range of audiences.
• A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make robust and critical use of it to support their explanations and judgements.
• The ability to consistently support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using detailed, appropriate and accurate historical evidence derived from a range of sources.

Intent

At Kidsgrove Primary School, we intend to give all pupils the opportunity to learn about the narrative that is the history of our world, nation and local area. Following the National Curriculum through the Opening Worlds curriculum in Key Stage 2, we aim for pupils to understand this narrative and to build on it themselves, creating inquisitive, learning loving characteristics in our future historians.

Opening Worlds is a knowledge-rich humanities programme for teaching History in Years 1-6. We intend for pupils to know the key history of the local area and to develop an understanding of where they come from. Nationally, we want our pupils to learn about:

• Key figures
•  Periods within history when significant change happened.
•  How this change shaped the world they live in.

 

When exploring outside of the United Kingdom, we want our pupils to discover:

• What happened throughout history,
• How this effected the United Kingdom
• How it influenced the world at that time and how it has influenced our lives today.

As part of the narrative of History, we intend for pupils to understand the order of events and to build a picture of how they fit into the narrative throughout their journey in school. We believe as a school that it is vital for our pupils to experience History, broadening their horizons and developing cultural capital; for example, trips to local and national museums are used. We want to give pupils a chance to build on their learning and understand further the developing world they live in.

Implementation

At Kidsgrove Primary, our History curriculum, which utilises the work of Opening Worlds in both Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 is taught as an individual subject in every half-term. These studies have been mapped out by Opening Worlds in advance for each of the year groups from 1-6, working as individual years to cover the National Curriculum objectives.

The key driver behind the Opening World’s curriculum is secure historical knowledge, which is coherent, connected and structured. Thoroughness in knowledge-building is achieved through intricate coherence and tight sequencing. Within our Opening world’s curriculum, the mastery of prior content plays a huge part in unlocking future content. Pupils advancing through our curriculum is enabled by what they have already learned, recognising vocabulary, ideas, people and places so that new material makes sense through connection, therefore freeing up working memory.

Distinctive features of Kidsgrove’s Opening World’s curriculum are:

• Thoroughness in knowledge-building, achieved through intricate coherence and tight sequencing.
•  Global and cultural breadth, embracing wide diversity across ethnicity, gender, region and community.
•  Rapid impact on literacy through systematic introduction and revisiting of new vocabulary.
• Subject-specific disciplinary rigour, teaching pupils to interpret and argue, to advance and weigh claims, and to understand the distinctive ways in which subject traditions enquire and seek truth.
• Well-told stories and beautifully written narratives.
• A highly inclusive approach, secured partly through common knowledge (giving access to common language) and partly through thorough high-leverage teaching that is pacey, oral, interactive and fun.
•  Efficient use of lesson time, blending sharp pace, sustained practice and structured reflection.

At Kidsgrove Primary, our history curriculum offers pupils the opportunity to grow and develop both their substantive and disciplinary knowledge.

Substantive knowledge is developed through:

• Ambitiously broad scope – pupils gain a multi-faceted understanding of empires, conquests, political processes, government structures and their links with migration, settlements and conquests. This lays a solid foundation as to how Britain today has been shaped through history.
• Meticulous rigor – links to up-to-date scholarship and what historians can be certain about. In units such as Islamic civilisations and Mesopotamians texts are worded carefully to ensure claims are worded cautiously, with due regard to what scholars can be certain about and what remains as informed conjecture.
• High coherence – intricate links have been made between history, geography and R.E. so that nothing sits in isolation, but is rather supported and enriched both horizontally and vertically.
•  Careful sequencing – building pupils understanding of new content so that can be drawn upon in later units. For example, children learn in KS1 about the notion of a ruler as someone who rules the people. This is then built upon further in units such as Ancient Egypt (Yr3) and Ancient Greece (Y4), the Roman Empire (Y4), the Vikings (Y5) and the Mayans (Y6) so that they have a full secure understanding of the impact rulers and changes of rulers has had on the world around us today.

Disciplinary knowledge is developed through children learning about how knowledge is constantly being reviewed outside of school by its practitioners (historians, geographers, philosophers, theologians, artists). Children learn that our knowledge about history is not fixed and is constantly being tested and reviewed. They will learn how to build or judge a historical argument from evidence and how to question what is informed conjecture.

In studying history as a discipline, pupils will:

• Use the concepts of continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, in order to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses.
• Practise the methods of historical enquiry, understand how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed.

To further focus children’s disciplinary knowledge, each unit within our curriculum will focus on one of the following areas:

At Kidsgrove Primary school lessons are planned using the Opening world long-term planning, which has been adapted to medium term planning overview documents by the school history lead. Teachers then use this document to plan and deliver history weekly. The Opening Worlds curriculum understands the importance of explicit vocabulary teaching and incorporates it into every lesson. Each unit in KS1 is designed to give children an overarching sense of history. Each unit in Key Stage 2 is linked to a textbook and this is used alongside the storytelling of the teacher to build the children’s understanding within context. An example of this might be: Children are introduced very generally to the concept of rule. Words which are covered in Year 3 are used again in Year 4, such as ‘ruler’ or ‘government’. They are then able to move onto learning vocabulary such as ‘consul’, ‘senate’ and ‘senator’ within the Year 4 Romans unit. This constant build of rich vocabulary sees our children develop a greater understanding of not only the topics but also what they are reading within specific lessons and across the wider curriculum. 

Our pupils encounter a growing variety of historical problems within each category (for example, yet more causation problems, worded in different ways, with different analytic demands, so that pupils start to recognise a causation question and know what to do with it, what ‘shapes’ of argument they require, while also being ready to encounter its many variations). They will also encounter a growing variety of primary sources, namely diverse records (for example, law codes, chronicles, letters, paintings, sculptures, inscriptions) and diverse relics (coins, buildings, the landscape, pottery).Just as with vocabulary, these accumulate, so that pupils recognise familiar sources or argument shapes which they’ve seen before and are able quickly to discern contrasts between prior encounters and new ones.

How do we provide for all learners?

Most pupils enjoy learning about the past, but some struggle with aspects of reading and writing. Pupils are encouraged to work as independently as possible, but reasonable adjustments are made for those pupils with SEND. Teachers aim to make history accessible and engage pupils of all abilities by adapting planning; pre-teaching of vocabulary; live modelling during lessons; where appropriate reducing outcome expectations; providing scaffolding, individual or group support or give additional time to complete tasks.

Reading Across the Curriculum

In order to develop children's reading skills, our teaching staff plan opportunities for children to independently read age-appropriate texts that link to the history topic being studied, or topics that have been previously studied. We have invested heavily in supporting our history topics with Collins Big Cat titles that enrich the wider curriculum. Whole class reading lessons are also intentionally sequenced to develop children's background knowledge and widen their subject-specific vocabulary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curriculum Enrichment

Where possible, units of work are enriched by a school trip, or by a visitor coming into school. Trips and visitors are carefully planned to ensure they link with what is happening in the classroom. For example, Year 4 visit the Grosvenor Museum to support their understanding of how the Roman occupation changed Britain. Teachers ensure all pupils are prepared for educational visits. Preparation can include looking at photographs, videos or studying artefacts, so that pupils are not worried about unfamiliar situations.

Impact

The impact of our History curriculum can be seen through: the outcomes of pupils, formative assessment, the work that they produce within their books, and through pupil voice. We believe that if children have become knowledgeable historians, then they will be able to articulate their understanding with confidence. This is why pupil voice is an important tool in assessing whether children have made progress. If a child is able to confidently formulate and explain their own responses to an overarching enquiry, then the curriculum and its delivery have been successful.

 

History Documents