History

‘Inspire curiosity to know more about the past– equipping them to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments and develop perspective and judgement.’

(National Curriculum)

Intent -

We believe that high-quality history lessons inspire children to want to know more about the past and to think and act as historians.

By linking learning to our themes, our children have opportunities to investigate and interpret the past, understand chronology, build an overview of Britain’s past as well as that of the wider world, and to be able to communicate historically. 

We develop children with the following essential characteristics to help them become historians: 

• An excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from a range of historical periods, including significant events in Britain’s past;
• The ability to think critically about history and communicate ideas confidently to a range of audiences; 
• The ability to support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using historical evidence from a range of sources; 
• The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past by formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry; 
• A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make critical use of it to support their learning;
• A desire to embrace challenging activities, including opportunities to undertake high-quality research across a range of history themes; 
• A developing sense of curiosity about the past and how and why people interpret the past in different ways.

Implementation -

History in our school is taught as part of our termly thematic approach and acts as a driver to form wider cross curricular links - how this is organised can be seen in the theme map below. History has been sequenced with a focus on chronology. In key stage 1 this focuses on the children developing an understanding of events within living memory and progresses to them looking at events that are beyond living memory, allowing them to be able to compare aspects of life in different periods. In key stage 2, this widens to exploring chronology within the context of pre-history, ancient history and more modern history. We have made a deliberate choice to organise the teaching and learning of history into a British history focus in the autumn term and a World history focus in the summer term as we believe this gives children the opportunity to make links, progression and develop a wider conceptual understanding of different periods of time.

We start each of our history ‘units’ with an enquiry question, which the children investigate and ultimately answer. This approach allows us to focus on key substantive knowledge, whilst also helping the children to develop an understanding of disciplinary concepts, which enables a wider  historical appreciation, helping the children to examine history in a deeper context than just facts.

At Chacewater the disciplinary concept we explore throughout the school are:

• chronology
• similarities and differences
• cause and consequence
• continuity and changes
• significance

At the beginning of each unit, children are given the opportunity to answer the ‘enquiry question’, which they will be studying through a sequence of thoughtfully planned lessons, which carefully plan for progression and depth concentrating on the historical skills appropriate to the age group. This same ‘enquiry question’ is then given to children as a post learning task, at the end of the unit, to show progress of children’s learning and knowledge.

The children are also given a knowledge organiser, which outlines knowledge and vocabulary the children will learn during the unit. This is something, which they will continue to refer back to throughout their learning. Along with this, an appropriate curriculum themed home learning task grid, is sent home for children to further their learning and develop their understanding.

Impact - 

Our History Curriculum is high quality, well thought out, planned to demonstrate progression and personalised to Chacewater. We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods: 

• An opportunity for children to answer the ‘historical enquiry’ question, once they have been taught the sequence of lessons
• A reflection on standards achieved against the planned outcomes; 
• A celebration of learning for each term, which demonstrates progression across the school; 
• Educational visits and visiting experts who will enhance the learning experience.
• Pupil discussions about their learning.
• Books, which follow the children through the school so that progress can be monitored and children have the opportunity to look back at previous learning