The teaching of history at Laurel Avenue Community Primary, is designed to aid teachers to help pupils build a history schema within their long-term memories. Rather than memorising isolated facts, building a strong historical schema enables pupils to organise knowledge in a meaningful way.
As a school we map
• Breadth of study - the topics the pupils will study
• Threshold concepts - the big ideas in history that pupils will explore through every topic (investigate and interpret the past, build an overview of world history, understand chronology, and communicate historically).
• Milestones - the goals that pupils should reach to show they are meeting the expectations of the curriculum.
Milestones are the goals that pupils are aiming for; through developing a strong schema based on knowledge, vocabulary and tasks pupils progress through the milestones.
Within the history curriculum, we use 10 knowledge categories that enable pupils to identify common themes and make links throughout different periods of history. The knowledge categories are: settlements, beliefs, culture and pastimes, locations, main events, food and farming, travel and exploration, conflict, society, artifacts.
Pupils with SEND are given full access to the history curriculum. Teachers use a range of strategies to enable all pupils to become successful historians including:
• Discrete teaching of vocabulary to ensure all pupils access and use historical terminology
• Pre-teaching where appropriate for example: sharing texts with a pupil prior to the lesson
• Dual coding to help pupils efficiently learn key concepts
• Thinking maps and mind mapping to enable pupils to organise and memorise key knowledge.