HISTORY

Our history curriculum, which has been created by our subject leader, is taught as an individual subject once every term. The studies are chosen in advance for each of the year groups working on a two-year cycle in Key Stage 1, with other year groups teaching as individual years to cover the National Curriculum objectives. Our history lessons are planned around areas of study that match the curriculum, work for our pupils and consider their enjoyment and prior experiences. We cover local, national and worldwide history through these studies, for example year 3 in Autumn study the local area of Cannock Chase and its mining history. Then in Spring they study nationally how life changed in Britain during the Stone Age from the Iron Age period. Finally, in the Summer term they study what life was like during the Roman period both worldwide but also the impact they had on Britain.

Our planning process sees teachers working collaboratively to plan the following:

• Knowledge organisers which outline the knowledge and vocabulary the pupils will learn during their theme including some additional factual information. They are provided to the pupils at the start of themes and revisited during learning to build on and model retrieval of facts.
• A sequence of lessons is carefully planned, with progression through the historical skills. It is also used to build a chronological progression through the period with key dates, people and places added to lessons.
• Low stakes quizzes using Microsoft Forms, which is used to support learners’ ability to retrieve information from the long-term memory back into the short-term memory embedding knowledge.
• Challenges added with key questions posed to encourage enquiry for pupils.
• Trips and virtual experiences that will enhance the learning through the theme.
• Home learning which will enhance the pupil’s understanding and encourage them to learn more independently about their theme.
• Opportunities to use the in-class timeline.

Lessons are planned using the long-term planning, allowing teachers to see the progression running through year groups so that knowledge can be built upon. For example, in year 3 the children learn about the impact that the Romans had on Britain and then they build on this further in year 5 where they see how this developed into the Anglo-Saxon period. This runs throughout the curriculum with knowledge constantly built upon to give the children a broad understanding of history.

In class, pupils are given access to a range of resources. As previously mentioned, we use trips and virtual experiences, which hook the child’s interest but are used throughout the theme to allow them to share their own understanding. We have a range of books available in each class for example ‘A Street Through Time’ which takes children on a journey of the same street through different periods of time. We feature many timeline-based books, which allow pupils of all ages to interact or research and see how the world around them has changed over time. We have a range of physical resources as well which allow our pupils to observe and make conclusions about what life was like in a particular period. We also have access to a range of resources online, with pupils given information from websites to use as part of their research and videos can be used to further add to this, for example we use Time Maps, a website allowing children to see maps and information from different periods of time. They are also given access to Digimap, which is a mapping tool used to show changes within living memory. For example, when looking at the local area in Key Stage 2 pupils can look at Cannock in three periods, 1890, 1950 and today to look for changes.

As the pupils move through school, they learn more and piece together the jigsaw of time that is history, to aid this each class has a timeline within the room. When a new period of time is taught, this is added to the timeline, allowing pupils to not only build a picture of time, but also allowing them to see how it fits in comparison to the current day. This timeline transfers with each year group as they move through the school so they are adding to their own journey through time. In Key Stage 1, we do not refer to times as BC or AD instead referring to this as time beyond living memory and within living memory. Then once pupils move into Key Stage 2 they are taught about BC and AD and how they relate to the previous terms they learnt.

COVID Statement (March 2021): Trips are not at the moment accessible out of school, so as a school, we continue to try and provide the pupils with opportunities that build on their in-class learning. Recently pupils have been able to, for example, take part in online learning from museums, with live lessons used during the teaching of volcanoes, in  Years 3 and 4 during the previous lockdown. This is an area we aim to use more over the coming year.