Geography
At Ash Grove Academy, we believe that Geography should inspire pupils to be curious about the world, its processes and its people and recognise their place in the world and their role in its future.
Our spiral curriculum explicitly builds upon children’s prior learning in the way that it is structured and, like the history curriculum, each geography topic is presented as an ‘enquiry’ so the sequence of lessons is designed to answer a geographical question or investigate a theme.
Children revisit and build upon locational and place knowledge, fieldwork skills and human and physical geography in each year group. Each year is structured with a focus on local geography in the autumn term, national geography in the spring term and global geography in the summer term, mirroring the history curriculum. The curriculums for geography and history have been designed in parallel to enhance the natural links between them in a way that is mutually beneficial for each of these humanities subjects.
Teachers are encouraged to ‘start local’ with every geography topic so that children use their experiential knowledge as a starting point and build important fieldwork skills as well as developing their sense of scale. Each child’s unique sense of place knowledge is also developed in an informal way across the year by plotting the locations of books, news stories and topics encountered across the wider curriculum including literacy on classroom maps of the world and the UK.
Outcomes for each year group, including for subject-specific vocabulary, have been clearly identified and mapped out in a progression document. This enables teachers to understand what geographical knowledge children have already attained and what their next steps will be.
Click here and scroll down to view the Ash Grove subject-specific vocabulary progression document.