Our School Vision
"This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it." Psalm 118
Our Curriculum Vision - Our Intent
At Finchampstead Church of England Primary School, our Geography curriculum is designed to foster children’s curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Children investigate a range of places – both in Britain and abroad – to help develop their knowledge and understanding of the Earth’s physical and human processes. We are committed to providing children with opportunities to investigate and make enquiries about their local area of Finchampstead so that they can develop of real sense of who they are, their heritage and what makes our local area unique and special. We are developing the children’s ability to apply geographical skills to enable them to confidently communicate their findings and geographical understanding to a range of audiences.
Through high quality teaching, we want to 'grow' geographers through developing the following characteristics:
- An excellent knowledge of where places are and what they are like, both in Britain and the wider world;
- A comprehensive understanding of the ways in which places are interdependent and interconnected;
- An extensive base of geographical knowledge and vocabulary;
- Fluency in complex, geographical enquiry and the ability to apply questioning skills, as well as effective presentation techniques;
- The ability to reach clear conclusions and explain their findings;
- Excellent fieldwork skills as well as other geographical aptitudes and techniques;
- The ability to express well-balanced opinions, rooted in very good knowledge and understanding about current issues in society and the environment;
- A genuine interest in the subject and a real sense of curiosity about the world and the people who live here.
- Enjoy sharing and taking pride in their learning through 'family learning events' when appropriate
To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in geography, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Geography is taught as part of a termly topic, focusing on knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum. The geography curriculum at Finchampstead Church of England Primary School is based upon the 2014 Primary National Curriculum in England, which provides a broad framework and outlines the knowledge and skills taught in each Key Stage. On the re-design of our curriculum, teachers worked in collaboration to ensure knowledge of skills were explicit and progressive due to the need to run a two year cycle to account for mixed age classes. Our curriculum is carefully planned to ensure that there is cohesive progression, which takes into consideration the interest and enjoyment of pupils.
As part of this planning process, teachers need to plan the following:
- Knowledge (including vocabulary) all children must master and apply in lessons;
- A cycle of lessons for each subject, which carefully plans for progression and depth concentrating on the geographical skills suited to the age group;
- Challenging questions for pupils to apply their learning in a philosophical/open manner
- Trips/fieldwork and visiting experts who will enhance the learning experience;
- Encouragement of home research and praise/rewards of completion.
- Inclusion of family learning events when appropriate to provide a showcase for children's learning.
Children will have developed the geographical knowledge and skills to help them explore, navigate and understand the world around them and their place in it. Children’s knowledge and skills will develop progressively as they move through the school, not only to enabling them to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum but to prepare them to become competent geographers in secondary education and beyond. In addition, we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:
- Short term: a reflection on standards achieved against the planned outcomes;
- Long term; children who enjoy their learning in Geography and able to discuss, with enthusiasm, their learning and make connections to the wider world, ready to take their learning forward in life.
Chaffinch class enjoyed being secret geographers and finding a hidden location where they collected human and physical geography clues to report back to their classmates. They also used grid references and a compass with an os map to locate their special place.
Our year three and four children enjoyed designing and conducting their own enquiry into traffic outside the school as part of our local area studies.
Living in the mountains: today we heard more about how challenging life could be in Bhutan and Ethiopia mountainous areas. Our visitor had travelled extensively through Africa and Asia and talked to us about the various challenges of mountain life including altitude sickness, farming in difficult conditions and transporting goods and people through such difficult terrain. It was great to meet someone who had travelled to these far-off places and it inspired us to do the same.
Geography: Goldfiinch had a fantastic day out at The Living Rainforest. We learnt a lot about how plants and animals have adapted to the conditions of a tropical rainforest and even managed to catch a glimpse of their shy sloth!
Chaffinch met an Explorer and learned so much about life on the River Sepik in Papua New Guinea. It was a fascinating lesson.
Year 1 and 2 worked hard creating a key for a simple map.
Autumn 2022 - Goldfinch made a model of the Earth's layers and labelled them. We are starting to think about why volcanoes happen.
Autumn 2022 - Geography: Goldfinch used the materials they were given to build a structure that would be resistant to earthquakes. We have some great engineers in our class!
Autumn 2022: Goldfinch investigated how and why earthquakes happen, using polystyrene and coloured water to help them think about what would happen on the Earth's crust when different types of plate boundaries are formed.
Summer 2022: we finished our European topic with a European Fair. Each stall represented our chosen country and we celebrated all the positive similarities and differences. It was great to share our learning across the school and with our families.
Summer 2022: our Polish visitor really inspired us to visit Eastern Europe today with tales of mountains, lakes, famous landmarks and exciting wildlife. It was great to be able to listen to the children ask such reflective questions about the climate, seasons, location and history of the country.
We had an interesting lesson on physical and human geography features today; sorting some wonders of Europe into two lists. Now we all have great aspirations for future travel and discovering more about our wonderful world.
We had such an exciting lesson learning more about the features of rivers as we made our own playground river. We saw a tributary, confluence, delta, source, mouth, riverbed, rapids, transportation, erosion and even a dam with a flood plain!
Enjoying atlas work in Chaffinch �� major rivers and their continents.
Field work - exploring land use categories
Chaffinch fieldwork exploring our local area. We were 'secret geographers' and had to locate, navigate to, and then report back on, a secret location to see if our classmates could identify it from our list of human and physical features and our grid reference.
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