Intent
With Faith, Hope and Love in our hearts together we grow and flourish.
At Stoke Minster, our approach to an ambitious, high-quality history education enables pupils to gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and the wider world. Through the study of British history, Ancient Civilisations and Non-European Societies, our children are inspired to know more about the past, giving them the foundation of knowledge needed to understand how the world came to be as it is today.
The history curriculum at Stoke Minster meets the EYFS and National Curriculum requirements and is both progressive and relevant to our children and the area in which they reside. Stoke Minster is a diverse multi-cultural community with a large proportion of our children having English as an additional language; our curriculum is designed to reflect this by recognising the rich diversity of pupil’s backgrounds for example Windrush in Y2 and Early Islamic Civilisations in Y6.
Our curriculum enables children to develop chronological knowledge and progressive historical vocabulary enabling children to confidently express their knowledge and understanding of connections between local, regional, national and international history for example Y1 history centers around recent and local history, closer in time to children’s own experiences. Y2 history begins to look at more abstract ideas and significant individuals which are further away from a child’s own experiences and KS2 units focus upon British and International history.
Our Golden Threads
Important concepts (golden threads) are threaded within units throughout the school to develop children’s understanding of abstract terms e.g. civilisation, service, migration etc. These are also closely linked to our values of Faith, Hope, Love and Flourish enabling the children to study how historical figures have demonstrated our school values and the impact their resulting actions.
At Stoke Minster, our children are taught to think like a historian as they understand the methods of historical enquiry, for example, progressively, children are taught to develop an awareness of the past and to understand how knowledge of the past is constructed from a range of sources as they compare and contrast identifying similarities and differences between time periods.
The historical skills that the children develop through their time at Stoke Minster are presented below on a skills wheel and built progressively as the children move through school.
The history curriculum is designed with retrieval practise in mind; essential or key knowledge is identified for each lesson to enable pupils to remember more overtime and therefore make connections between topics. Our units take on a question based approach (see example unit below). Each unit is based upon a large question which each lesson contributes to answering (rather like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle).
We recognise that reading is the corner stone to learning; therefore, often historical facts and core knowledge are taught during our wider curriculum reading lessons (which take place three times per week). As a result of this our children begin their history lessons with a good knowledge base leaving history lessons free to build historical skills such as contrasting and comparing, asking questions, using sources etc. Enabling our children to become historians.
Example Unit Plan
Knowledge organisers are developed for each unit of work in History so that children can see at a glance the key knowledge required for each lesson. These are bespoke to our school curriculum and made available to all children for use every lesson. Our history lessons follow a specific structure, all beginning with a retrieval activity covering key knowledge from the lesson before.
An example knowledge organiser:
Lesson structure example:
Throughout the history curriculum there are planned opportunities to enhance pupil’s cultural capital as we aim to reduce social inequalities and prepare our children for future educational success for example workshops within school and visits to museums (local and national). In addition, where appropriate, our reading journey also includes some texts which are linked to the history curriculum.
