HISTORY
Curriculum Intent
Why is the subject important?
At Mosborough we believe providing children with a challenging history curriculum is essential as it equips them with skills needed in life. We believe history helps learners to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups. It develops skills of critical thinking which means making reasoned judgments that are logical and well thought out. Our history curriculum supports children to understand that all knowledge is socially structured and the objectivity and reliability is therefore open to question through weighing evidence and developing perspective. It builds a sense of identity and belonging on a personal, cultural, national and global level consequently leading to a better understanding of themselves and as members of society. Finally it enables learners to understand cause and consequence, similarity and difference, continuity and change, significance, evidence, chronology, empathy and perspective.
As we believe the teaching of history is essential we aim to:
- Stimulate children’s interest and curiosity about the past.
- Allow children to explore and question historical periods, significant events and people in the past.
- Allow pupils to appreciate how things have changed over time.
- Reflect on how history has impacted our lives today.
- Help children understand society and their place within it so that they develop a sense of their own identity.
- Allow children to plan and research different historical periods by using a range of sources.
- Help connect ideas and events together in order to gain a sense of chronology.
- Help pupils develop the skills of enquiry, investigation, analysis, evaluation and problem solving.
Implementation
History learning is facilitated through pupils pursuing a key question led enquiry approach, which encourages them to take increasing responsibility for their learning, think independently and achieve challenging subject outcomes. Our autumn term is named the discover term and is based on a history big question led enquiry, which allows for sufficient scope and time to really engage in high order subject skills. Whilst knowing more subject information as the pupils progress through the school it is important we are careful in our planning to ensure that there is always a balance between new content and the development of important subject concepts and the ability of children to think critically about what they are learning and why. Our historical enquiries are carefully planned to enable pupils to construct knowledge, master subject concepts and generate questions of their own through the application of a range of critical thinking skills.
Impact
The impact and measure of this is to ensure that children are equipped with historical skills and knowledge that will enable them to be ready for the curriculum at Key Stage 3 and for life as an adult in the wider world. All children where possible will have been ‘immersed’ into the topic, they will have designed enquiries to pursue which are relevant, engaging and appropriately challenging in terms of anticipated outcomes which help pupils answer significant questions about events, changes and the lives of significant individuals or events. Evidence of key question led enquiries that have been structured to include a number of enquiry questions, will have ensured pupils progress gradually towards arriving at an answer to the overall big question. A wide range of sources of information like books, stories, eye-witness accounts, pictures/photographs/films, artefacts, maps, historic buildings, visits to museums, galleries and sites with ICT will have been used. Through teaching a challenging history curriculum our children will have built up a broad range of skills (included below).
These are the skills the children will progressively develop throughout history lessons:
Recognise
Identify
Describe
Observe
Select
Categorise
Classify
Sequence
Connect and make links
Compare and Contrast
Recall
Reason/Speculate
Summarise
Synthesise
Construct informed responses
Interpret and explain
Demonstrate understanding
Empathise
Reach Informed Conclusions
Make reasoned Judgements
Reflect
Justify
Apply
Evaluate
Critique
Hypothesise – devise historically valid enquiry questions
Supporting documents and useful links:
Our History Policy can be viewed here
Our History skills progression can be viewed below
Our History long term curriculum can be viewed below
