History
History Subject Lead Statement: Helen Walters
History – describing and explaining the past and imaginatively reconstructing it through the process of enquiry. That’s what history is all about and why it is so fascinating to children (and adults) of all ages.
History has always captivated me. Perhaps it’s a natural curiosity to know why?, who?, how? or the excitement of piecing clues together but whatever the reasons from primary school to today (many, many years later) history has played a large part in my life. My earliest memories of History learning in school are creating a project into Aztec Life in Primary School and sparked an interest into the ways in which historians are able to recreate the past. Moving into Secondary School and in GCSE and A-Level History, the War years and European History fascinated me particularly as it was within living memory of many of my family members who provided me with priceless first-hand sources such as documents, photographs and letters, many of which I now enjoy sharing with children in school.
The teaching of History was a large factor in deciding to become a Primary School teacher and I specialised in History and Geography during my training at university. Becoming subject leader for History was exciting as it has allowed me to share my enthusiasm not only with the children I teach, but also with staff and Governors. Seeing children excited and enthused by the past and drawing upon evidence to both answer and pose questions is wonderful. History allows them to understand the here and now and empowers children to face their future.
The teaching of History can be challenging – it’s not all battles, gore and excitement and by its very nature of being of a different era, can sometimes be difficult to relate to and understand. As subject leader one of my aims is to work to overcome such challenges and make all periods of time studied relevant, relatable and real for all children across school. Working closely with staff we have developed a progressive, diverse and tailored school curriculum which builds upon both the substantive and disciplinary, developing key skills and gaining knowledge needed across consistent concepts to allow children to contrast, compare and describe the periods they study and offer opinions backed-up with reasoning and evidence.
‘We are not makers of history. We are made by history.’
Martin Luther King
Curriculum Intent
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.
|
Curriculm Implementation
Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it:
• Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
• Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
• Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
In addition to the three principles, we also understand that learning is invisible in the short term and that sustained mastery takes time.
Our content is subject specific. We make intra-curricular links to strengthen schema.
Continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, replaces the teaching of some aspects of the curriculum and, in other cases, provides retrieval practice for previously learned content.
Through the use of ‘Know Its’ taken from the topic webs, pupils are given opportunities to periodically revisit knowledge gained within current and previous milestones and relate it to current learning.
|
Curriculum Impact
Formative Assessment
Pre-unit diagnostic assessment.
Verbal Feedback – the vast majority of feedback is in conversation with the pupil, allowing misconceptions to be spotted and effectively addressed at an early stage.
Know Its - periodical assessment of pupils' prior knowledge gained within current and previous milestones, related to current learning.
Summative Assessment
End of unit assessment - assessed against Key Stage Milestones.
Proof of Progress (POP) tasks against the milestones.
|
|
Our curriculum distinguishes between subject topics and threshold concepts.
Subject topics are the specific aspects of subjects that are studied. Threshold concepts tie together the subject topics into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, pupils return to the same concepts over and over, and gradually build understanding of them.
Each Threshold Concept is explored within different contexts so that it has tangibility and meaning. Breadth of contexts ensures that pupils gain relevant knowledge and can transfer this knowledge.
|
Knowledge Progression: Milestones
|
|
|
|
|
Know Its: including Vocabulary
Through the use of ‘Know Its’ taken from the topic webs, pupils are given opportunities to periodically revisit knowledge gained within current and previous milestones and relate it to current learning.
|
|
|
|
|
