Geography
At Our Lady of Compassion Primary School, we are GEOGRAPHERS!
We want our children to love geography. We want them to have no limits to what their ambitions are and grow up wanting to be cartographers, town planners, conservationists or weather forecasters.
Our aim is that, through the teaching of Geography at Our Lady of Compassion, we provide a purposeful platform for exploring, appreciating and understanding the world in which we live and how it has evolved. We want to ensure that through Geography, pupils are able to explore the relationship between the Earth and its people through the study of place, space and environment.
In Geography, pupils in our school will learn the skills of understanding locational knowledge; how and where people fit into its overall structure. We also intend for children to become passionate and knowledgeable about our local community and beyond, by learning through experiences in practical and fieldwork activities.
‘You can travel the seas, poles and deserts and see nothing. To really understand the world, you need to get under the skin of the people and places. In other words, learn about geography. I can’t imagine a subject more relevant in schools.’
Michael Palin
Implementation
A guiding principle of CUSP Geography is that each study draws upon prior learning. High volume and deliberate practice is essential for pupils to remember and retrieve substantive knowledge and use their disciplinary knowledge to explain and articulate what they know. This means pupils make conscious connections and think hard, using what they know.
CUSP Geography is built around the principles of cumulative knowledge focusing on spaces, places, scale, human and physical processes with an emphasis on how content is connected and relational knowledge acquired. An example of this is the identification of continents, such as Europe, and its relationship to the location of the UK.
What do we teach?
Early Years
The Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum supports children’s understanding of geography, people and communities through the planning and teaching of ‘Understanding the World’.
Children learn about features of their own environment such as school, home, community and their city through first hand experiences and learn how environments may differ through the sharing of books, stories, poems, small world play, role play and visits. Children enjoy the valuable experiences gained from our regular trips to places within their local community such as the library, park, the village and the beach. Children are given time to discuss, comment and ask questions about what they observe about the world around them and are encouraged to be active learners and explore their interests further.
Key Stage 1
The sequence in KS1 focuses young children to develop a sense of place, scale and an understanding of human and physical geographical features.
Later in KS1, CUSP map skills and fieldwork are essential to support children in developing an understanding of how to explain and describe a place, the people who live there, its space and scale.
Initially, children study the orientation of the world through acquiring and making locational sense of the 7 continents and 5 oceans of the world. They extend their knowledge and study the countries and capital cities of the United Kingdom, along with the oceans and seas that surround us, routes and maps can be made concrete in day-to-day experiences in the safety of their school grounds and classrooms.
Throughout KS1, pupils enhance their locational knowledge by studying and identifying human and physical features of places and contrasting locations throughout the world. The location of these areas in the world are deliberately chosen to be culturally diverse.
Fieldwork and map skills are further developed with a study of the local area, using cardinal points of a compass. Maps are introduced through familiar stories as a way to communicate what the place and space is like. Pupils retrieve and apply knowledge about human and physical features in their local context. OS maps are introduced to pupils in KS1 using Digimap for Schools. Simple keys and features are identified and mapped locally to help begin to understand place, distance and scale.
