Geography

Geography Lead - Mrs Henson

Intent:

At Phoenix Infant and Nursery School we aim to inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Geography plays an important part in this as it can inspire children to think about their own place in the world, their values, and their rights and responsibilities to other people and the environment. We want to provoke questions about the natural and human worlds, developing children’s cultural awareness and knowledge about diverse places, people, resources, and environments.

The aims of teaching geography at our school are:

• To provide our pupils with a deep understanding of our planet’s key physical and human processes.
• To provide opportunities for children to undertake geographical enquiry and skills by investigating and expressing their own views about people, places and environments, both in and outside the classroom.
• To develop the skills of interpreting a range of sources of geographical information, including maps, diagrams, globes, aerial photographs and Geographical Information Systems.
• To help children understand how the human and physical features of a place can change over time and teach children to collect and analyse evidence and draw conclusions.
• To enable children to progressively develop their geographical skills (including fieldwork) throughout their school journey.
• To foster enjoyment, satisfaction and curiosity for finding out about places, patterns and processes.

Implementation:

At Phoenix Infant and Nursery School, we provide a high-quality Geography curriculum that has been carefully designed and sequenced to equip our children with a secure, coherent geographical knowledge of their locality, Britain and the wider world. Retrieval practice is at the heart of this, ensuring the prior learning is built on and meaningful connections are made. This starts in Nursery with children learning about their personal geography and developing an understanding of the Nursery grounds and progressing into F2 where children learn about important locations beyond the school gates. In Key Stage 1, children explore their local communities and develop an understanding of the physical and human features of hot and cold countries, making comparisons and drawing conclusions. They also develop their map skills and geographical vocabulary by exploring a place outside of Europe. Brilliant Beginning activities done at home provide an exciting starting point before each new topic, which the children then share with their classmates. This, as well as, teacher assessments inform the programme of study and also ensures that lessons are relevant and take account of children’s different starting points. Consideration is given to how greater depth will be taught within each lesson, as well as how learners will be supported in line with the school’s commitment to inclusion. Our pedagogy meets the children’s learning needs and we fully utilise our onsite outdoor areas and ensure we have opportunities for learning beyond the classroom.   

Reading across the curriculum: In order to develop children's reading skills, our teachers plan opportunities for children to independently read age-appropriate texts that link to the topic being studied. We have invested heavily in supporting our topics with a new Library of books for the whole school to use that support our curriculum. Studies show that if children encounter new knowledge within a narrative, they are more likely to retain that knowledge. Therefore, when possible will be teaching through high quality texts or taught alongside thematically linked texts during English lessons.

Impact:

We believe that if children have become knowledgeable and skilful geographers, then they will be able to articulate their understanding with confidence. Therefore, pupil voice, along with work produced and floor book evidence will be an important tool in assessing whether children have made progress. The work produced by our children and the discussions they have, should demonstrate that they are equipped with the geographical skills and knowledge that will enable them progress beyond Phoenix.

• Geography Policy

Our Geography Curriculum

Geography in Action

Year 2 class 6 learning about Orienteering. We then worked in small groups using a map of our school grounds to visit the check points. From these check points we had to work out what word the letters were trying to spell.

Year 2 class 6 completing some fieldwork research to find out which forms of transport travel outside our school the most. We recorded our findings using a tally chart.

Year 2 class 6 learning about maps and how we can use a key to understand what and where things are

Class 4 have been learning all about our local area and have even been for a walk around the local area to look for different human and physical features.

Have a look at our display in Class 5 showing some of of Geography work from our topic 'Around the World'. We have been learning about the different oceans and continents as well as understadning what human and physical features are and identifying them.

Year 2 Class 6 learning about human and physical features found within Europe.

Year 2 class 6 making comparisons between England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 and India 🇮🇳 and further building on our knowledge of human and physical features.

To finish our Around The World topic year 2 this week have compared foods to the foods and ingredients we use in this country. We looked at some Bollywood dancing from 🇮🇳 India. Then as a treat we tried some pakoras 😋