St Joseph's Catholic Primary School

Intent

Through our history curriculum at St Joseph’s, we intend to deliver a child centered approach to creative history education that will develop and equip our pupils to ask questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. We will help pupils to understand the complexity of theirs and other people’s lives, change, the diversity of societies and different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time.

We will develop in the children a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. We will share with the pupils an understanding of the past through settings, characters and events encountered in books, role-play, drama, storytelling and other media. The pupils will be able to show an understanding of historical concepts such as change and continuity, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance of events. 

Throughout their journey at St Joseph's, pupils will develop an extensive historical knowledge of significant events in British, European and world history ; developing a secure understanding of key historical vocabulary; have an increased awareness and sequential understanding of the past with a sense of chronology and time.

Finally, they will be given the opportunity to understand with enthusiasm the links between local, regional, national and international history through the exciting first-hand experiences that we will give our children.

Below is the History roadmap of historical topics mapped out across the school.

Implementation

At St Joseph's we aim to provide the opportunities for children to practise key skills, we implement and embed our approach in all that we do. Through planning we demonstrate a coherent sequence of learning and coverage of the National Curriculum and key historical knowledge and skills needed for our learners to develop to their full potential.

Below is our History planning progression document, which maps out the schools topics in line with the National Curriculum.  

In EYFS, pupils learn about the history of themselves from a baby, significant events leading up to present times. They will learn to retell past events in their lifetime in the correct order. This will all link to RE teaching, following on from Jesus being a baby, learning about his childhood and his journey to become an adult.

In KS1, pupils are introduced to learning about changes in living memory and beyond living memory, by learning about the lives of significant people of the past, understand the methods of historical enquiry and beginning to ask and answer questions about the past.

In Lower KS2, pupils learn about the history of Britain from the Stone Age to Romans creating knowledge of lives, experiences and methods that changed our world today.  In contrast children will learn about a non-European society such as the Mayans along with exploring ancient times such as the Egyptians.

In Upper KS2, children learn more in depth about the 19th and 20th century focusing on Victorians, WWI and II which develops a deeper understanding of historical concepts such as change and continuity, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance of events. 

History is taught as a half-termly or termly topic, focusing on knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum, to build an in-depth knowledge about a particular period in history, or understand how an aspect of life has changed through time.

Through quality first teaching misconceptions are addressed within lessons and links are made to embed and deepen knowledge and understanding.

Impact

By the end of their learning journey at St Joseph's we want our pupils to:

• be are aware that they are learning history in their lessons and through their experiences.

• have a  secure knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from the historical periods covered.

• have the ability to think critically about history and communicate confidently in styles appropriate to a range of audiences.

• have the ability to consistently support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using detailed, appropriate and accurate historical evidence derived from a range of sources.

• have a passion for history and an enthusiastic engagement in learning, which develops their sense of curiosity about the past and their understanding of how and why people interpret the past in different ways.

• to be able to make links between our local, regional, national and international history.  
• to retain the knowledge of the historical topics they have studied throughout school or through first-hand experiences they have had at St Joseph's.  
• to feel prepared for the next stage of their history education and part of their adult life.

See our implementation of history further visit Twitter and search #SJKHistory.