GEOGRAPHY AT ST LUKE'S
Subject leader: Miss M Doherty
"Geography is about more than just memorising places on a map. It’s about understanding the complexity of our world, appreciating the diversity of cultures that exists across continents. And in the end, it’s about using all that knowledge to help bridge divides and bring people together."
-Barack Obama
What we believe:
At St Luke's Primary School, we believe a high-quality geography education should inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about their local area and the world as a whole. Our aims are to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for Geography; providing a broad, balanced and differentiated curriculum; ensuring the progressive development of geographical concepts, knowledge and skills; and for the children to develop a love for geography. Furthermore, we aim to inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Our teaching equips pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments, together with a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes.
Each term the children are immersed in either a Geography or History topic and subject leaders have sequenced the order in which the topics are taught within each year group to ensure prior knowledge is built upon. Teachers plan lessons for their class using our termly knowledge organisers and planning documents. Teachers use these documents to plan their sequential geography lessons; challenging all learners to broaden their knowledge and build on and develop their subject specific vocabulary.
At St Luke's Primary School, the children have many opportunities to experience geography on educational visits to Castleton. The children explore the local area and within our Forest School zone within the school grounds. Local museums also provide an opportunity to further geography learning, as well as trips to local woods, beaches and using map reading skills during residential trips.
Through active engagement in geography, we focus on enabling children to think as geographers and how geography has many applications in everyday life. Our children enjoy learning about the world, understanding how people live in different locations and the positive contribution they can make as global citizens of the future.
Long Term Plan:
National Fieldwork Week 2022
Throughout the week of June 6th - June 10th children took part in National Fieldwork Week 2022 to enjoy the outdoors and gain the important skills of fieldwork through many different activities. Below shows how they used the local community to identify different types of rocks using the local estate and playground. Children had access to a range of cross-curricular activities including, ICT, Numeracy and Science to help create a fun-filled day for their fieldwork findings.
In March 2022 St Luke's were granted a bursary to take part of the next Wild in Art Project connected with The Globe Reimagined to help encourage children and people to actively talk about the topic 'Slavery'. Children within St Luke's were lucky enough to create and after discussing with their teachers decided on a beautiful and brightly coloured aboriginal inspired design to finalise an amazing globe which is going to be displayed on the Manchester Trail and eventually be brought back to St Luke's and put on display.
Well done St Luke's!
Helping your child with Geography at home:
A curiosity for the world is the most important thing to encourage in a young geographer. This should start on your doorstep! Walk around your locality and discuss the human and physical features of your local area. You may even want to use Google ,Maps or Earth to encourage your child to spot significant landmarks and places.
Explore the wider world from your computer! Google Earth is an wonderful resources to explore the planet’s physical and human features!
Useful links:
Documents:
Reviewed January 2023