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History

"We are made by History."  Martin Luther King, Jnr.

Our Intent:

Here at Ropsley we flourish as Historians because:

Our History curriculum is designed to equip all children with the skills of enquiry, research and critical thinking; enabling them to flourish as they dive deeply into the diverse history of the world around us.  We strive for children to develop a life-long enthusiasm for acquiring knowledge, as well as an understanding of how the past has shaped lives, in a personal, local, national and global context.

We do this by ensuring our curriculum is inspiring, engaging and inclusive for all; providing practical, innovative activities and a range of resources that bring history to life, with the aim of instilling in our children a curiosity and the desire to know more. We value the rich experience that trips, visitors, and experience days provide, and we recognise the importance of finding out about history in a range of ways: using non-fictional and fictional accounts, real life sources from our community and a range of media’s.

We celebrate our children as informed researchers, who can gather facts and opinions about the past to make judgements and gain a historical perspective as their knowledge increases.  

Our Implementation:

As history is a broad-ranging subject, we have designed Ropsley’s History curriculum with careful consideration to the different strands that recur when learning about local, British and world history. 

We wanted to ensure that we had the correct balance of breadth and depth as well as ensuring that our curriculum was relevant to the children and included local links. Our children’s History journey begins in EYFS and is carefully mapped throughout school, with knowledge building year upon year. We have identified how knowledge relates to past and future learning to help children build, connect and remember different aspects of the curriculum in the long term.  This helps teachers to emphasise how knowledge is interconnected, enabling children to build a strong schema to remember more.

When designing our history curriculum, we identified key strands which run throughout our curriculum. These concepts help both teachers and children to group history knowledge into more manageable units which helps to draw out the links between ideas and processes as children progress through school. These are: Invasion and conflict, locality, significant people and events, change and diversity.

Key knowledge of historical content, chronology and historical processes ( which includes enquiry, interpretation and communicating understanding, as well as understanding historical concepts such as similarities and differences, significance, continuity and change and cause and consequence) are built on progressively throughout KS1, LKS2 and UKS2.

All lessons build on prior learning and teachers support all children to learn and remember more through: 

  • Use of the progression map to ensure that pupils have access to lessons which have a clear structure which builds on skills taught in the previous year. 
  • Use of knowledge organisers which outline sticky learning, including vocabulary, all children must master. 
  • Support for children with SEND through a multi-sensory approach which builds on preferred learning styles, as well as the use of innovative activities which bring the subject to life and are accessible for all through differentiation.
  • Time given in each lesson for the understanding of chronology, looking at when the event occurred in relation to other events and . 
  • Opportunities to apply basic skills taught in other subjects, i.e. use of number, persuasive texts, research etc. 
  • Specialist vocabulary for topics taught and built up. 
  • Class trips and visitors/experience days to support the teaching of topics.  
  • Emphasis is placed on using and examining historical artefacts and primary sources where possible and teachers value the importance of stories in history teaching and regard this as an important way of stimulating interest in the past.  Use of library loans boxes to provide artefacts. 
  • There is a clear over-arching sequence to the history learning. 
  • Well-structured, relevant and focused classroom activities are provided – involving interaction and dialogue between teacher and pupils and between pupils themselves.  

Impact

Our historians reflect their understanding of the topic being taught in KS1 through challenges that require them to draw on previous learning. In KS2, our historians conduct a research product, drawing on prior learning and building on this learning through independent research; creating an end product that reflects the knowledge they have acquired.

In addition to this:

  • Children are quizzed on their knowledge organisers throughout the sequence of learning enabling teachers to assess understanding.
  • Pupil discussions give children a chance to showcase their understanding
  • Books are monitored in school and moderated as part of the GRACE trust cluster meetings.