Humanities

At Staplehurst School, we are passionate about our humanities curriculum, which provides all pupils with a high-quality history and geography education. Our pupils are engaged in developing their knowledge, skills and understanding through a knowledge rich, creative and imaginative curriculum. Children develop into learners with enquiring and curious minds, who are talented geographers and historians with an appreciation and understanding of their role within a local, national and global community, both in present day and in the future, through their study of events in the present and past.

Our teaching of humanities equips pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments, in the past and present day. We teach children a sense of chronology with a range of in-depth studies of different societies and cultures. As pupils progress through our bespoke curriculum from EYFS to Year 6, they demonstrate a clear progression of knowledge, skills and vocabulary across the school appropriate for their age, linking their previous learning with current and future learning. Each humanities unit develops a sense of enquiry, with an over-arching question, which is answered through carefully planned and sequenced lessons, leading to an extended essay piece of writing at the end of each unit. Children are given the skills to retrieve, collect, organise and integrate their learning in every lesson and at the end of each unit.

Lessons are taught with carefully identified core knowledge and substantive concepts. Children develop themselves as historians and geographers through their study of ‘second order’ (disciplinary) concepts, including:

History: cause and consequence (why thinks happen and their outcomes), change and continuity within and between periods of history, similarity and difference (experiences of groups or individuals within a period of history), significance (how events brought about significant change), evidence (use of sources of information) and interpretation.

Geography: space and place (where places are in the world, including physical and human features), scale and connection (viewing places from a personal, local, regional, national and global scale, making connections between places around the world), proximity and distance (distance between two different locations, where things are within a space, use of direction, existence of relationships between things) and relational thinking (how we perceive this place)

We secure pupil’s understanding of the history and geography curriculums, through the progression of interconnected units across the school, National Curriculum objectives and core knowledge within each unit. Teachers use fieldwork, artefacts, educational visits and visitors to the school to enhance pupils understanding, knowledge and skills in questioning, application of learning, and vocabulary within each subject at an appropriate level for each year group.

Children are passionate about their learning, which is celebrated throughout the year with events involving the whole school and local community. These events include Black History Month and Traveller History Month.