Humanities (History and Geography)
Our Approach to Humanities at Naima JPS
At Naima, we have carefully designed our curriculum to enable our children to become confident, creative and independent learners who can explore the use of knowledge and skills throughout their learning.
We seek to broaden children’s real-life experiences inside the classroom and beyond the school gates, through educational visits, visitors, experimentation, exploration and discovery. We work very hard to ensure the curriculum reflects our diverse community, to expand pupils’ horizons and encourage them to carefully consider key themes and debate. Within lessons, our children acquire a range of knowledge and skills in both history and geography which they can then apply to other contexts and in a variety of situations. Furthermore, it is our aim that through historical and geographical learning, children will become accountable citizens, understanding their role in protecting our world and environment and knowing how they can cause positive change and development as they grow.
Across the course of a year, each year group studies a variety of humanities topics. These topics typically have either history or geography focus to allow our learning to hone in on core subject-specific knowledge and skills. Links across and between subjects give children a broad base of knowledge, facts, vocabulary, real-life experience and contexts to use for learning. Key topics are re-visited throughout children’s school-career in varying forms in order that they may deepen their skills, knowledge and understanding.
History Curriculum Overview
‘History helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time’ (National Curriculum, 2014).
Naima’s history curriculum ensures that pupils study a variety of historical periods within Britain and the wider world; Pupils also study people who have been inspirational throughout history; enabling them to see how they can overcome obstacles and achieve great things in life. Through this, pupils develop a range of historical understanding and skills.
In Key Stage 1, children focus on the core skills of chronology and sequencing. They also look at a range of different evidence in order to find out about the past. In Key Stage 2, the units selected enable children to build on previous knowledge and make links across the periods and events they have studied. They learn the main skills of chronology and examining evidence and these build in complexity from Year 1 to Year 6.
Within each topic, lessons follow carefully planned sequences which support children to build on their previous knowledge and skills whilst learning new content. Throughout each topic there is a balance of practical, hands-on learning, research reading and written recording of knowledge. At all times during the learning of history, children will be taught how to investigate a wide variety of sources of evidence to support their knowledge of historical events or periods of time.
By the end of their time a tNaima each child will have been taught a wide range of key historical skills to enable them to investigate and respond to historical questions using relevant, organised and thoughtful information.
Geography Curriculum Overview
Naima’s geography curriculum is designed to provide children with learning opportunities that ‘equip 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’ (National Curriculum, 2014) as well as the key skills to investigate and learn about these.
Our curriculum provides a range of diverse activities through which children learn about their immediate environment as well as those in other parts of the world. By the end of their time at Naima, each child will have experienced a wide variety of learning opportunities in order to develop their knowledge and understanding of place, space and scale and the ways in which they connect. In geography, children focus on five key areas of geography: location, place, human geography, physical geography, and map skills with fieldwork.
When children leave Naima, we expect them to have a secure knowledge of a range of different countries, to have considered key concepts such as immigration and trade, and well-developed geographical mapping skills.