Intent

At Pinewood Infant School, Geography has a clear learning journey across the whole school. The pupils will learn about their local environment, community as well as the wider world. Geography is taught through topics that are inspiring and aim to develop children’s natural curiosity. We want our children to develop skills in recognising, describing, explaining, comparing and evaluating human and physical geographical elements with a high level of technical vocabulary being accurately used and applied. We aim to produce independent and evaluative thinkers who have empathy for how others live to develop an awareness, respect and curiosity for different cultures and societies and the physical world around them. Children should have the opportunity to ask questions, make links, allowing them to make sense of the world around them. They will have opportunities to work collaboratively and through the use of field work, trips and other experiences. Geography at Pinewood is accessible to all learners, regardless of individual starting points. 

Implementation

At Pinewood Infant School the Geography curriculum is taught through a geographical enquiry approach including many cross-curricular links. The children will attempt to answer an overarching enquiry question through a combination of approaches starting with a hook to inspire the children. This will enable links to be developed that support the children’s own developing, local, national and global knowledge.

This approach encourages the children to become more independent learners, taking responsibility for their own learning. The children are encouraged to ask questions and develop their own lines of enquiry, using research skills to facilitate this. We approach learning creatively and understand that there is more than one way to achieve an objective or accomplish a task, in order to make lessons more engaging and accessible to all.

We follow a skills progression in order to ensure curriculum coverage and in order to develop the children’s key geographical skills and understanding throughout the school. High quality, up-to-date resources are used to support learning including globes, maps, photographs and atlases – as well as IT resources such as Google Earth in order to also develop children’s digital literacy.

Children work towards completing a quality outcome at the end of the learning journey to demonstrate their learning. This approach encourages collaborative learning and develops communication skills and resilience. Our school has a clear focus on the development of speech and language and allowing children to make links and embed the vocabulary. We use working walls, visual prompts and pre-teach some vocabulary to enable children to develop a deeper understanding and apply in different contexts. This also helps children to make links and develop their speaking and listening, as well as their writing, across the curriculum.

Impact: progress and attainment

At Pinewood Infant School we can judge the success of our geography curriculum in the following ways:

• Pupil conferencing – are children happy, engaged, motivated to do well, challenged?
• Learning walks (including those with governors and external visitors) –do they show evidence of our intent in action?
• Planning – is it allowing children to gain knowledge and master skills, does it meet the needs of all learners? Is it following a geographical enquiry approach starting with a hook?
• Topic Books – is presentation of a high standard and are all children making at least expected progress from their various starting points?
• Data – is attainment and progress at least in line with National averages, do all groups achieve as well as they should? What provisions are in place to support children who aren’t making progress?
• Learning environment – is it rich in language to support children’s learning, does it support independence?
• Class teachers and the SLT conduct half termly pupil progress meetings where performance analysis is linked to triangulated monitoring, measuring performance against individual and school targets.