History Intent at Springdale First School - WE ARE HISTORIANS!

Who are we? How did we get here? Who and what do we remember and celebrate?

Every society has a rich and diverse history, filled with triumphs and tragedies. It is these key moments that have shaped us as individuals, locally, nationally, and globally. By getting children to begin to understand key events and people that have been pivotal in history, we aim for children to then make connections with their modern lives and begin to look at we are shaping the future. We don’t want children to be able to recall dates and facts, but to understand the causes and consequences, how things have continued to be or changed.

We aim to offer a high-quality history education that will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of their local and national past and that of the wider world. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, compare and contrast, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups. It also helps children gain a sense of their own identity within a social, political, cultural, and economic background. This enables our children to learn to value their own and other people’s cultures in modern multicultural Britain, whilst also celebrating the contributions of significant people and celebrating everyone’s differences.

After all of this, we hope to have started to create more globally aware citizens who are willing and able to contribute to the world in a responsible and compassionate way.

Implementation

History is taught in termly blocks throughout the year, split with Geography, so that children develop a deeper understanding and depth to their learning. Teachers understand the key knowledge and skills of each topic and consideration has been given to ensure progression throughout each year group across the school. All learning starts by revisiting prior knowledge. This is scaffolded to support children to recall previous learning and make connections building upon a specific schema based around key threads. Staff will model explicitly the subject-specific vocabulary, knowledge and skills relevant to the learning to allow them to integrate new knowledge into larger concepts.

We ensure, through our curriculum design, that knowledge is built upon, giving the children the opportunity to make connections between periods of history as well as concepts, creating a mental timeline. This is aided by each year group focusing upon a specific century, with Reception focusing on the near and now, Year 1 looking at the 1600’s, Year 2 the 1700s, Year 3 the 1800s, and Year 4 focusing on 1900s to modern day. Many concepts and threads feature regularly throughout our curriculum within a range of contexts. As a result, they are particularly important to pupils’ understanding of new material, allowing our children to be able to draw on their secure knowledge of these repeatedly in several different contexts. We feel this is highly important, as this encompasses children enquiring historically, allowing them to delve into the role of a historian.

Key Concepts

At Springdale, we have key concepts that run through and across the year groups. These will be continually revisited and explored across the children’s academic journey. Each thread is underpinned by key vocabulary and knowledge that will be explicitly taught in History, and sometimes across other subjects to help students make links. The key concepts are: