History at Isle of Ely Primary
Intent
At the Isle of Ely, we want children to have a strong connection to their local, national and international history, diving deeply into the knowledge of different eras, people and places.
Our history curriculum seeks to provide children with a strong and confident understanding of the U.K., as well as the development of other countries from ancient times to more recent history.
We support them in understanding the past as they move into the future, developing them into confident and understanding citizens. We consider the historical narratives the children learn and teach them about oppression throughout history – both in terms of the historical events themselves and in the acceptance of the retelling and interpretation of the events. We highlight the contributions of historically ‘unheard voices’ and highlight positive and negative impacts of colonialisation and growth of empires – both within British national history but also the international history of other countries and cultures. We hope that this will make our children aware of the racial inequality throughout the world’s history.
Implementation
We follow a core knowledge curriculum, which has created a methodical sequence for children to build on their knowledge year by year as they move through the school. As children learn new vocabulary, facts and figures, these will be recapped on in later years to consolidate learning as our history is linked in many ways. For example; learning about the Roman conquest of England, but in later years learning about Ancient Rome and the origins of the Roman Empire. Our history teaching develops cumulatively and progressively by teaching British history chronologically as they move through the school.
Alongside this knowledge, we also teach our children to be historians and how to study the past. We focus on comparing past eras to what we know today, artefacts that we have and can teach us about the culture and lives of people in history and how to ask probing questions to extend our knowledge and unpick more of our history.
Knowledge organisers will be key to providing children with core knowledge of different eras and will also support the teacher’s knowledge that they can pass through their teaching. These will be shared with parents/carers to support History at home and strengthen relationships between home and school. Adults at home will be able to expand children’s historical learning with their own experiences alongside supporting newly acquired knowledge from school.
We hope to form strong, powerful links with our local history community, embedding this in our curriculum to provide new and exciting learning opportunities. We will utilise our local facilities and sites to support children’s learning and memory of key aspects of different historical eras, using these in real life settings. This may involve visits e.g. to Ely Cathedral to learn of its origins or to Ely Museum to learn about how our area has developed from its origins to the present day.
Impact
Our children’s accumulated historical knowledge will be assessed half termly at the end of the era or period they are learning about. This may take the form of quizzes linked to the core knowledge in each era, or an investigation as a historian with historical artefacts or images. The school also uses Key Performance Indicators linked with the enquiry skills needs to explore history in depth and these will be woven throughout their learning using mini plenaries, key assessment questioning and recaps.
Our children leave our school confident in their knowledge of many aspects of History, as well as understanding the progression of time and chronology. This will allow them to have a strong understanding of their wider community.
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