Geography

Our Lady and St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School

Geography Subject Overview

What does this look like in Geography?

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.

Geography 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 Geography and develop a sense of curiosity about the subject; making links between different contexts.
At Our Lady and St Teresa’s, we foster a learning environment that does not limit our children, believing all children can achieve in Geography, and we work alongside our children to secure deep understanding of mathematical concepts. 

Curriculum Intent:

Through our broad and balanced curriculum planning, Geography at Our Lady and St Teresa’s engage with a variation of opportunities. We aim for all pupils to:

• Expand their geographical vocabulary.
• Have a good understanding of natural and human environments, as well as physical and human processes.
• Have geographical skills and be able to apply them.
• Be able to describe, question and discuss the world.
• Be able to debate important topics such as renewable energy and deforestation.

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 geography. Lessons are carefully sequenced to demonstrate progression building on prior knowledge and enabling children to apply it to new learning. We take the opportunity to link both geography and history to help solidfy 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 skill with secondary sources, maps and field work.  All children participate through active learning strategies.
• Practice: efficient, accurate recall procedures; requiring pupils to flexibly move between different contexts and representations. A range of resources are used to help create immersive learning experiences.
• Prove it : providing learners with opportunities to reason and apply geographical vocabulary and skills by following a line of enquiry. Pupils are encouraged to justify and convince through their reasoning.
• Dig Deeper : pupils explore methods for solving increasingly 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.

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

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

• End of unit markers
• Completion of challenge questions
• Learning Journeys
• 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 concrete, pictorial, abstract (CPA) techniques to show thinking and problem solving. This is further underpinned by the accurate use of Geography vocabulary which ensures all Geographers 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 Geography which comprises of the following:

• Learning walks
• Book trawls
• Pupil interviews