Curriculum - History

Intent

We aim to:

Implementation:

Due to the nature of our mixed age classes, it is not possible to teach all historical topics in chronological order for all children, however we have arranged the KS2 curriculum so that the topics themselves are arranged in time order with the earliest being in Year C of our curriculum cycle. This ensures that wherever the child joins the cycle, they will experience history taught chronologically (to ensure they ‘know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative’ N.C.) except in the transition between Years B and C.

 Learning and objectives in History are divided into seven key areas: 

• Historical Enquiry
• Chronological Understanding 
• Historical Knowledge
• Historical Interpretation: how the past is represented and interpreted in different ways
• Organisation and Communication 

 Within these areas, progression in skills is clearly defined to build children’s substantive and disciplinary knowledge in History.

Enquiry-based curriculum:

To ensure an engaging history curriculum, we approach each topic with an over-arching enquiry question and have individual lesson focus questions which help build towards children being able to answer the over-arching question. When children have sufficient knowledge of the period to make inferences and grasp the terms that others are using (substantive knowledge), their disciplinary knowledge is made purposeful and meaningful through applying it to answer the over-arching topic question in a suitable manner.