Kingsway
Primary School
History
Intent
It is our intention at Kingsway to fire children’s curiosity about the past in Britain and the wider world and help them to understand the diversity of human experience.
Ee believe that history is important as it provides children with the opportunities to empathise with others, argue a point of view and reach their own conclusions – essential skills for adult life. Therefore, we aim for a high-quality history curriculum that has been carefully designed and sequenced to equip our children with a secure, coherent knowledge of local, British and world history. Curriculum content is knowledge and vocabulary rich and allows our children to develop their understanding of historical concepts as they move through school.
We intend to inspire our children to develop a broad historical and cultural awareness by:
• Providing opportunities for our children to develop a chronological framework by investigating the past and how it influences the present.
• Encouraging our children to interrogate evidence and form their own opinions.
• Enabling our children to communicate their viewpoints in a variety of ways using appropriate vocabulary.
• Exploring a range of sources of information.
• Fostering enjoyment, empathy, and curiosity for finding out about the past.
All children shall benefit – Every Child, Every Chance, Every Day.
Implementation
The national curriculum for history aims to ensure that all pupils:
- know and understand significant aspects of the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced ad been influenced by the wider world.
- know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies; achievements and follies of mankind
- gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and peasantry
- understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, differences and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses
- understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed
- gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, nation and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long term timescales.
At Historians at Kingsway, the children will delve back in time and broaden their understanding of the exhilarating history of our country and wider civilisations. Learning experiences focus on enabling children to think ‘as historians’ and our aim is to develop the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding through the celebration of curiosity and inquisition, and the delivery of creative and engaging lessons.
Through learning history, pupils ask and answer questions about the past, investigating how events in history have influenced their lives today. We teach children a sense of chronology and through this, they develop a sense of identity and a cultural understanding based on their historical heritage.
We recognise the fact that we have children of differing ability in all our classes, and so we provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child. We achieve this through a range of strategies, which are differentiated by task, expected outcome and/or support from peers or adults.
We ensure that children at our school are equipped with historical skills and knowledge that will enable them to be ready for the curriculum in secondary school and for life as an adult in the wider world. By the end of Key Stage 2, children are able to give articulate definitions of key historical conceptual threads that run through the curriculum.
Please see the History progression overview and specific coverage documents for a more in-depth understanding of how we approach this subject at Kingsway.