At Eling Infant School, we shape our history curriculum to ensure it is fully inclusive to every child. Our aims are to deliver the full requirements of the National Curriculum; providing a broad, balanced and differentiated curriculum that includes our British Values throughout. Historical knowledge and skills will be taught progressively and continually so that learning is embedded into our children’s long-term memory.

 

Intent

At Eling Infant School, our intent is to create independent historians who are curious about Britain’s past, the world and about their own past. Our teaching will allow children to understand how our country has been influenced by the wider world, understanding that major events have had a knock on effect. Children will be taught about changes in living memory and beyond living memory, learn about the lives of significant people of the past, learn about events beyond living memory that have been significantly nationally or globally and learn about the history of their own locality. We are lucky enough to have a working tide mill, with its own history, that we must explore. The children will learn skills and methods to become historians, gaining knowledge through classroom learning, artefacts, educational visits and use of fieldwork. Primary and secondary resources, along with real experiences, will enable our children to full embrace different parts of our history.

To ensure the pupils develop a secure knowledge that they can build on, our history curriculum is organised into a progression model that outlines skills, knowledge and vocabulary which will be taught in a sequential way. Chronological understanding, historical understanding, historical enquiry, interpretation of history and organisation and communication are all mapped out to ensure skills and knowledge are built on.

 

Implementation

Through high standards of teaching, we will implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. History will be taught over three half terms in KS1, focusing on the knowledge and skills set out in the National Curriculum. History will have the same importance as all other subjects. We will sequence learning, layering and building upon previous skills so that it is embedded in the long term memory of the children. Continual assessment will allow opportunities to re-teach and move on. Children will be given hand on experiences to develop their history enquiry skills, but will also be able to use visits to gain other historical understanding. We will start each block by revisiting prior knowledge. This will be scaffolded to help children recall previous knowledge, such as a quiz.

Knowledge organisers will be sent home prior to each history block to give parents and carers an idea of the learning taking place and the language we will be teaching the children. Specific trips will be used to help put the history into real life. During our ‘Megastructures’ topic, we will visit Portchester castle and experience how people lived in the past. The children will also visit the local Tide Mill, a place that makes Eling very special.

Learning walls will be updated weekly to give children the chance to recall and retain skills and knowledge. Specific language will be placed on these boards. History assessment will happen daily, but half termly assessments will take place at the end of the blocks. The use of quizzes, both written and verbal, will be used throughout to show what learning has taken place and what the next steps are.

 

Impact

The impact and measure will be that our children leave year 2 with the historical skills and knowledge needed to be ready for the KS2 curriculum. We want them to enjoy being ‘historians’, independently learning about the past. The language and skills needed to be a historian will be fully embedded. Learning walls will be maintained to allow children to be more independent in recalling knowledge, skills and vocabulary.

 

(Reviewed by subject leader September 2024)