History

Our Lady and St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School

History Subject Overview

What does this look like in History?

At Our Lady and St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School, we equip our children with the skills and talents to become lifelong learners; we offer a curriculum that is aspirational, achievement driven and inclusive for all learners. This is achieved through the fulfilment of statutory requirements coupled with rich and purposeful learning opportunities.

History is an important, creative discipline that helps us to understand and be a part of our world. At Our Lady and St Teresa’s, we want all pupils to experience the power and enjoyment of History and develop a sense of curiosity about the subject, making links to understand our world.
At Our Lady and St Teresa’s, we foster a learning environment that does not limit our children, believing all children can achieve in History, and we work alongside our children to observe and have a deeper understanding of the world around us.

Curriculum Intent:

Through our broad and balanced curriculum planning, History at Our Lady and St Teresa’s engage with a variation of opportunities, through a range of evidence, artefacts and trips.

We aim for all pupils to:

• Work as historians and develop historical skills.
•  Have a secure chorological knowledge and understanding from the Stone Age to the present day.
• Understand how events have occurred concurrently in different worldwide locations in order to compare and contrast.
• Use research skills to pose questions and investigate the past by making inferences and drawing conclusions.
• Ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, develop perspective and judgement.
• Have an understanding of how history has shaped their life.
• To have a deeper understanding of their locality, through local history studies.

Curriculum Implementation:

Each lesson is based on the National Curriculum and is taught through a range of teaching and learning styles to develop Pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills in history. Lessons are carefully sequenced to demonstrate progression building on prior knowledge and enabling children to apply it to new learning.

What a typical lesson looks like:

• Flashback: opportunity for pupils to retrieve and build upon previously acquired skills, through a: 'Last Lesson, Last Unit, Last Year, Challenge’ approach.
• Teach It: introduction to new history skill linked to their historical topic. All children participate through active learning strategies.
• Practice: they use their skill to ask historical questions, form and understanding of the history and develop a perspective
• Prove it : providing learners with opportunities to reason and apply historical vocabulary and skills by following a line of enquiry. Pupils are encouraged to justify and convince through their reasoning.
• Dig Deeper : pupils explore historical enquires solving increasing challenging problems which require resilience and encourage them to persevere.

To ensure all children are appropriately challenged, an episodic teaching approach and adaptive teaching strategies are implemented. This ensures pupils move through the lesson at a pace and stage which is appropriate for their attainment within each lesson. Lessons are appropriately pitched and challenging to inspire and support learning, providing opportunities to explore the past.

We also provide a range of learning opportunities to enable all peoples to develop skills and understanding in History.

Assessment
The termly data drop on Bromcom is informed by the assessment procedures below:

• End of unit markers
• Completion of challenge questions
• Informal judgements about pupil’s progress and attainment through observations in lessons.

Curriculum Impact:

There is a clearly structured learning approach; supported further by the children using a variety of artefacts, Historical trips or visits and secondary resources to pose questions, evaluate evidence and draw conclusions. This is further underpinned by the accurate use of History vocabulary which ensures all History at Our Lady and St Teresa’s can articulate and explain their thinking in detail.

Monitoring, Evaluation and Review

Our Lady and St Teresa’s implement a systematic approach to Monitoring, Evaluation and Review in History which comprises of the following:

• Learning walks
• Book trawls
• Pupil interviews