Geography: Intent

In line with the Opening Worlds humanities programme, our Geography curriculum at Mosspits Lane is designed to secure the highest possible quality teaching and learning for pupils. It has a focus on ensuring that children receive teaching and learning that properly includes knowledge-rich geographical content and essential geographical skills. The Geography programme is carefully sequenced across KS1 and 2 so that children progress through units of work, building key knowledge and skills, interlinked with History and RE in rich and exciting ways, to create a coherent programme of learning.  

Children are taught substantive content which is presented through geographical accounts, stories and case studies, challenging and ambitious subject-specific vocabulary and through explicit links between the humanities topics of Geography, History and RE. This knowledge is designed to be ‘sticky’ and ensure that children are excited by the subject and naturally make deep connections between knowledge learned and knowledge taught across all three subjects.

The curriculum is also designed to include and address disciplinary content. Children are taught to ask geographical questions and think like geographers. The programme of study ensures that pupils think about geographical questions using concepts of place, scale, diversity and variation over space, change, interaction and relationships; pupils tackle questions in which they solve problems concerning the 4 P’s of place, pattern, position and processes and deepen their understanding of geographical processes. They interpret a range of sources of geographical information, including maps, diagrams, globes, aerial photographs and digital technologies. They communicate geographical information in a variety of ways, including through maps, numerical and quantitative skills and writing at length.

The focus on secure vocabulary acquisition supports the teaching of literacy across the school. Clear understanding of key words allows children to better access reading materials and allows for better comprehension of new information. The topics taught offer children are socially broad, ensuring representation of all types of people and cultures both locally, nationally and globally.

Our Geography curriculum takes account of and embraces our locality with a focus, at points, on local geography; fieldwork is an important part of this.