History 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. Our curriculum meets the minimum standards as set out by the National Curriculum and looks to go beyond it to ensure that pupils leave Holmer having a strong foundation for the next step in their education journey. Kapow is used to support the delivery of teaching at Holmer C of E Academy. This is a well researched scheme and scaffolds learning to ensure a clear progression and sequenced delivery of substantive and disciplinary knowledge. Within history, we wish to provoke curiosity through the use of inquiry-based learning to help deepen children’s understanding and provide them with transferable skills that can be used across the curriculum and outside of school.

Our history curriculum enables pupils to develop better understanding of the world in which we live. Building knowledge and understanding of historical events and trends enables them to develop a much greater appreciation for current events today and feel a sense of belonging where they fit into our world. A high-quality history education will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time.

How is History organised at Holmer?

Therefore all our history lessons are designed to:

•    enable children to learn about the past; 
•    allow children to learn through exploration and enquiry;
•    provide opportunities for children to explore how people lived whilst looking for similarities and differences between different time periods; 
•    encourage children to think about how the past shapes today;
•    provide children with a chronological awareness of the past; 
•    include a variety of activities to provide children with the opportunity to explore what happened in the past, encouraging them to think about why these events happened, and more importantly, what we can learn from them;
•    cover historical topics that provide children with a coherent knowledge of Britain’s history and that of the wider world;
•    excite and motivate children as historians through teaching a range of topics to provide pupils with the opportunity to explore and investigate the past.

At Holmer, we use adaptive teaching. 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 history curriculum can be broken down further into the following areas:
 

All our recommended reads have been researched and carefully selected to enhance our history curriculum.

Click here to find more amazing recommended reads:

Click on the link below to learn about key periods in Britain’s history.

http://primaryhomeworkhelp.co.uk/timeline/stuarts.htm

Historical Herefordshire

Herefordshire is an amazing place to live! It was recognised as a charter town in 1189 but its history goes back much further than that. If you would like to find out more about Hereford’s history, you could visit one of these places to learn first-hand what life was like here in the past.  The following are just a few suggestions.

• Black and White House Village trail to discover what homes looked like in the 15^thand 16^thCentury.
• Goodrich Castle, Goodrich.
• Hereford Cathedral to see the Mappa Mundi – The largest medieval map of the world thought to be drawn around 1300AD. 
• Hereford Museum, Hereford. The museum holds collections of artefacts collected from within the county.
• Offa’s Dyke. Take a walk along this massive earthwork built in 757-796AD by Offa, King of the Mercians as a defensive barrier to keep out the Welsh.
• The Black and White House Museum, High Town, Hereford.
• The Waterworks Museum to learn about Herefordshire’s Victorian pumping works.

Click on the links below to BBC Bitesize to watch videos and learn about different periods of history that you’ve been learning about.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zkqmhyc

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/zcw76sg

Ology

This is a great website that tells us how archaeology helps us to learn about life in the past.  There are games, videos, stories and ideas to try at home all linked to different times in history.

https://www.amnh.org/explore/ology/archaeology#hands-on

Some Key Historical Terminology

Match each of the following word to its meaning. You could print this off and play as a game of matching pairs!