Geography

Our Geography curriculum vision is:

To understand Geography as the way that the natural world interacts with the human world and how understanding more about this interaction has lead to improvements in people's lives over time.

At Birkbeck, we believe that Geography is a subject that contributes to children's sense of place and position within their local community as well as their wider national and international communities. As well as providing a unique opportunity to engage with the issues and circumstances facing different communities around the world, it also allows children to reflect on how the world directly around them works and functions and the vital role that geographical considerations play in decisions concerning these areas. 

Our curriculum coverage posters provide information about which units are taught in which year groups and the order in which they are taught. You can view the Geography one below:

 

COMING SOON... 

 

Our Geography curriculum has been written around the development of key concepts which become threads which are continually revisited throughout a child's journey through the school. This approach enables us to build new knowledge on top of existing knowledge and to therefore enable children to make meaningful connections because of their increased ability to retrieve the old to make sense of the new. You can read about how each of our key concepts are strategically developed below.

geography curriculum narrative docx.pdf

 

 

Below you can see the development of our key concept threads in grid form so that you can see how each one is progressed and developed as children move through the school.

geography concepts progression docx.pdf

 

 

Because of the nature of our curriculum, the knowledge we teach is planned in precise detail and you can read more about what we cover in each unit of work in the documents below. 

Our approach also means that children are more confident and ready to apply their substantive knowledge to the discipline of geography itself when they have the opportunity to do so later on in their units of work each term. This work includes field work, giving children the opportunity to engage in real world geography and enrich their experience and understanding of the practical application of the subject. 

You can read more about the content of each unit of work below. 

COMING SOON...  

Lesson delivery

Every Geography lesson begins with a retrieval practice starter which has the aim of activating prior knowledge around the concept thread which the lesson to come is focused on.

Every lesson also includes clarification of any technical vocabulary to be used in the lesson. This always takes place before the main lesson content begins.

All Geography lessons are delivered in line with our overall principles of teaching and learning and with our Principles of Geography teaching. These are the principles that we believe underpin truly great teaching and learning, specifically in the context of Geography teaching. You can read about these in our Geography implementation guide below. This document also details which units of work children study in which terms of each year.

geography implementation guide 24 25 4 docx 1 .pdf

 

Assessment

We assess Geography once per term. Children complete an assessment based on the key concepts that have been taught in the unit of work being assessed. The assessments take place in week two of the preceding term to allow for some forgetting to have taken place. This means that we can rely more certainly on the robustness of knowledge that children have remembered. It also means that we can use the assessment as learning opportunity in itself because the act of thinking hard to remember previously taught knowledge actually increases the retrieval strength of that piece of knowledge, meaning that it is easier to retrieve the next time round. 

The outcomes from assessments inform our judgements about whether or not a child is meeting the expected standard for a year group but more importantly, they identify gaps in their knowledge that we need to address. The most common gaps are revisited as starter activities for the following six weeks to give children an opportunity to consolidate and re-learn the knowledge a second time.

We also utilise the testing effect (the act of actively trying to remember previously taught knowledge to apply it) on a  weekly basis with our 'Early Afternoon Work'. For example, if Geography is taught on a Monday then on a Thursday, (3 days after the teaching), children will have a question on the board for them to get on with when they come in from lunch that tests how well they have remembered the content taught on the Monday. Teachers then provide feedback to ensure that the correct understanding has been processed by all children.