Geography Curriculum Overview

" Inspiring us all to create a better world"

Matthew 5: 13-15 " You are the salt of the earth...you are the light of the world."

At Holmer C of E Academy, we are committed to providing a purposeful and empowering curriculum that fully prepares learners for the next steps in their school career and opens the doors to the wider world. Geography surrounds us and forms parts of our everyday life and through our geography curriculum, we hope to broaden our pupil’s horizons by helping them to understand the community they live in, their interaction with the environment and the relationships between nations. Within geography, we wish to provoke curiosity through the use of enquiry-based learning to help deepen children’s understanding of the world around them and provide them with transferable skills that can be used across the curriculum and outside of school.

Therefore, all of our Geography lessons are designed to:

• provide opportunities for children to explore different topics whilst acquiring new skills;
• allow children to develop an awareness of where different countries are;
• provide children with experiences to help them develop their understanding of different countries and their cultures;
• inspire children’s curiosity about the world;
• incorporate a variety of activities and themed days to help children to learn about different countries and their cultures, helping to promote cultural capital; 
• allow children to work individually, in pairs and groups to develop key Geographical skills focusing on map work, investigating human and physical geography and fieldwork;
• excite and motivate children as geographers through teaching a range of topics to provide pupils with the opportunity to explore and investigate the world around them.

All lessons are differentiated. This means teachers plan activities that enable the objective to be learned by all children including those who will find the objective challenging, those children who with hard work will secure good progress and those children who can tackle extra stretch and challenge in this subject.

The following is a guide to help you understand your child’s progression through school. The Geography curriculum can be broken down further into the following areas:
 

Top tips to help your child become a brilliant geographer!

• Explore your local area with your children so that they are familiar with it. 
• When planning a trip somewhere, point out the place on a world map so they can see where they are going in relation to where they live. 
• Let older children investigate route maps and help them to plan the route places that you visit. If you use public transport talk about types of transport – where they might be going. 
• Use small world toys- farm sets, train sets, dolls houses etc – talk about the layouts and rooms etc – what belongs where – where the tractors go etc. 
• Go to the library and choose books about different people around the world, different cultures and places.
• Use playdough or Lego to make famous UK landmarks or famous landmarks from around the world.
• Make a scrap book of postcards you have collected from different places you have visited. 
• Take pictures of the view from your back window once each month at the end of the year. Can you order them together? How has the view changed through the months/seasons? 
• When on holidays, help your child to make holiday diaries - artefacts, drawings, postcards and tickets etc. 
• Talk about places in films that you watch together – Finding Nemo, Jungle Book, Lion King, Happy Feet, Frozen, Ice Age etc. 
• Have a look at the labels on your food/clothes and see what countries they have come from. Can you point these countries out on a map, atlas or globe? 
• When you visit your friends or family, go for a short walk and discuss how the area is similar and different to the area that your home is in. 
• Go for a walk in a local wood or forest – at different times of the year – spring time or autumn (leaf kicking time). The seasons is a very important pattern to observe. 
• Watch the weather forecast on TV and then check if they got it right. Keep a weather diary so that you can compare how the weather changes during the different seasons. 
• Let your child grow their own flowers, fruit or veg in your garden.  
• Go mini-beast and habitat hunting. Create your own garden eco tour. 
• Star watch at night from a homemade den 
• Talk about environmental topic issues highlighted by news programmes such as News Round.