Mousehole School’s History Curriculum Intent
Intent
History is vital to a rich and broad primary education. At Mousehole, we aim to help children make sense of the present as well as the past, and to appreciate the complexity and diversity of human societies and development.
Implementation
As a school, we have carefully considered the building blocks of progress in history, identifying knowledge that is essential to pupils’ understanding of new material. Our curriculum is designed to build up pupils’ knowledge of substantive concepts, such as empire, tax, trade and invasion. These are just some of the crucial components of pupils’ comprehension of new material because they are abstract ideas, and therefore difficult to grasp, but are also used very commonly in history. Where appropriate and from the beginning of KS1 we use the correct and often complex historical vocabulary; maintaining our high expectations for pupils’ learning. We ensure that we explicitly teach challenging concepts and use them regularly in context. In history teaching, previous learning is revised at the beginning of each lesson and knowledge assessed throughout and at the end of a block of work. It is important to regularly revisit periods of history and cross reference them with new learning.
The Mousehole School History curriculum has been designed with chronology in mind. It aims to develop pupils’ knowledge of broad developments and historical periods, and provide them with a ‘mental timeline’ of the past. This knowledge supports pupils to place their learning in context both in history and across other subjects. There is a deliberate overlap in some areas of history curriculum between the Key Stages allowing for a different historical focus but in a similar time period to be explored. In Early Years the teaching of history begins with the teaching of Knowledge and Understanding of the World. This includes; Past and Present, People, Cultures and Communities and the Natural World. The development of an understanding of a passing of time in the Early Years leads into the teaching of History in KS1, with a focus on 7 Key Areas of Historical Understanding: Chronological knowledge and understanding, Uses of Sources, Historical Enquiry, Cause and Consequence, Similarities and Differences, Significance and Vocabulary and Historical Terms.
Periods of history are revisited to ensure knowledge is retained and new information woven into the timeline, whilst the skills of the developing historians are tested and enhanced at each stage. At Mousehole, we have carefully selected the skills that will be acquired with each period of history taught as well as the vocabulary we expect each pupil to understand and use confidently by the end of that body of work. Planning of the two year rolling programme and curriculum content is guided by the National Curriculum and lesson progression and subject knowledge is supported by the school’s subscription to Grammarsaurus. Pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) are fully included in all history teaching and their particular needs supported to allow them to access the full history curriculum.
Impact
The introduction of a two-year History rolling programme has revealed through monitoring and Governor Forums and lesson-by-lesson quizzing that children have a deeper understanding of world history and the influence it has on our lives today. An essential question that provides the hook and introduces each project (e.g. “How was our community affected by World War II?”) is worked towards with carefully sequenced lessons. The opportunity to relate historical events to local lives, families, stories, myths and legends has served to make history relevant and of course memorable.