Geography

Geography at Warton St. Paul's

Our Geography Subject Leader is Miss Towers and she is responsible for ensuring our Geography Curriculum and resources suit our needs and are updated regularly to support our learning. 

Geography

Intent

At St Pauls, we believe that high quality geography teaching offers our children the foundations for a greater understanding and knowledge of the world, as well as their place in it. Our geography curriculum provides children with skills and knowledge for developing a natural curiosity and fascination about the world around them.

The aims of our geography curriculum at St Pauls are to develop pupils' contextual knowledge of the location of globally significant places and to be able to identify their key physical and human features and characteristics.  At St Pauls, we are also passionate about allowing our pupils to develop an interest and understanding of their local area. Across the curriculum, we provide pupils with opportunities to complete fieldwork and observations of the geography surrounding them and our school. This makes our curriculum unique and relatable to the children at our school.

By the end of a child’s journey at St Pauls, they should have an understanding of geographical vocabulary, as well as key facts and skills that enable them to ask questions about the world around them. Ultimately, our aim is to ensure pupils leave our school knowing more, remembering more and understanding more about the world around them.

Implementation

At St Pauls, we have created our own geography curriculum overview and skills and knowledge progression document, which outlines the key skills for each unit in geography and categorises the skills into key areas: locational knowledge, place knowledge, human and physical geography and geographical skills and fieldwork. 

Throughout each geography unit, a variety of key skills from the skills and knowledge progression document will be taught. Alongside this, each lesson will have a group of keywords that can be displayed during a lesson, to support children's knowledge and build vocabulary. 

Google Earth, Google maps and Digimap resources are widely used across the curriculum, to provide a practical and visual element to geography lessons. 

Impact

The impact of what we have done has been positive for children, teachers and subject leadership. Teachers understand clearly what they have to teach but also why they have to teach it. This allows for teachers who find geography a difficult subject to feel empowered and confident about their delivery. It also gives signposts for all in terms of resources available in school and out of school. This saves teachers time in terms of planning and preparation and impacts massively on their work life balance. Ultimately, allowing teachers to be more confident of their delivery of geography. Teachers know explicitly what needs to be taught in their topics and this also allows for teachers to be creative in how they would like to teach each topic. With additional websites and resources available to teachers, this has provided teachers with a wide range of ideas and tools for teaching geography effectively. 

For the children, the first major impact we have seen is that they enjoy their geography lessons. Through pupil conferencing, pupils can explain their key vocabulary being taught and can explain geographical concepts taught, by using the knowledge and skills obtained through a geographical topic. 

Overall, by the time children leave our school, they are aspiring Geographers who can interpret a range of Geographical information including maps, globes and digital imagery. We also strive to ensure children leave St Pauls with a natural curiosity and care for the world around them.