Geography

Intent

At Radford, we aim for our children to develop a greater understanding and knowledge of the world, and their place in it, through our geography curriculum. We intend to ignite children's curiosity and fascination in the world around us and promote understanding of diverse places and people. In our geography lessons, we provide a purposeful means for exploring, appreciating and understanding the world in which we live and how it has evolved. Geography explores the relationship between the Earth and its people through the study of place, space and environment.

Implementation

Geography is taught as part of our theme curriculum and forms a central focus for many of our units.

In our geography curriculum we have ensured a focus upon our children’s local area, for example in our Year 1 unit ‘Myself, My School and My Village’, whilst also becoming aware of and developing knowledge and understanding of the world beyond their own environment, for example studying Mumbai in India in our unit ‘Around the World’ due to the high proportion of families of Indian heritage in our home town of Leamington Spa.

Geography encourages children to learn through experience, particularly through practical and fieldwork activities. We believe it is important to build a geographical curriculum that endorses the importance for outdoor learning to build a curiosity for learning to help them to know more, remember more and understand more. We incorporate this within our geography curriculum by planning opportunities to use the school grounds, local environment and going further afield to conduct geographical fieldwork.

To encourage our children to build upon prior learning, we make use of learning journey displays as a reference point, using knowledge organisers and starting each lesson with 'Flashback Four' questions in which children are quizzed on something they learnt 'last lesson', 'last month', 'last topic' and 'last year'.

Impact

The impact of our geography curriculum is continually assessed to allow us to build upon prior knowledge, identify any misconceptions and extend children's learning.

Our Geography Lead completes a range of monitoring activities throughout the year to identify the impact of the children's learning.

When looking at children's books with them and discussing their geography learning, the children shared the following thoughts and reflections:

"I like geography lessons because I enjoy looking at things around the world." Year 5
"I have really enjoyed finding out all about our topic on the Polar Regions. It has been really interesting." Year 4
"Geography is my favourite theme lesson. I like finding out more about the world." Year 2