History

Our History Curriculum

Our History curriculum offers coherently planned sequences of lessons to ensure we have progressively covered the skills and concepts required in the National Curriculum,  enhanced with local and current knowledge. Our History aims to develop historical skills and concepts which are transferable to whatever period of history is being studied and will equip children for future learning.

Intent

Our very youngest learners begin with linked areas from ‘Understanding the World’  (taken from the Early Learning Goals in the EYFS statutory framework and the 2020 Development Matters curriculum) to compare the past with the present of things familiar to them, such as toys, homes, farming, holidays, royalty and transport. To begin to build a concept of time they look at lifecycles, and explore exciting topics such as dinosaurs and pirates, finding out about the world and its past.

Building on this early start our History curriculum aims to ensure that all pupils know and understand the history of the United Kingdom as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day.

Through the study of people such as Florence Nightingale, and Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrong in the Intrepid Explorers topic our children gain an understanding of how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world.

Our local studies of Castles, the industrial revolution in Iron Bridge, or the Roman settlements in Oswestry, Chester or Wroxeter help our children gain a historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into local contexts and builds connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.

Our children learn about significant aspects of the history of the wider world such as the nature of the earliest civilisations through the study of the Stone age to the Iron Age and ancient Greece and Egypt. They develop an understanding of expansion and dissolution of empires by studying the Romans and the Vikings. We teach characteristic features of past non-European societies through a study of The Maya and the Shang Dynasty of China.

The children explore the achievements and follies of mankind through learning about the first space flight, medicines and diseases, and crime and punishment.

Through the study of the Anglo Saxons, Pics and Scots the Great Fire of London and World War 1 and 2 our children learn historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance. Our topic approach helps children to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses.

We want our children to understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed.

Above all we want to create confident, discerning and passionate learners. Our mission is to to ensure that history is loved by all our pupils across school, therefore encouraging them to want to continue building on the wealth of historical knowledge and understanding they develop, now and in the future.