Curriculum Intent
The aim of the history curriculum is to support the building of a chronological and coherent understanding of the past. It is our intent for children to be able to understand and explain how people used to live and events that happened in the past. This will enable children to make sense of the world they live in, how people have shaped the past, and how and why aspects of the world have and will continue to change. They will have a secure understanding of chronology of past events and be able to make links with people, places and events from the past in their local area.
Curriculum Implementation
The units covered in Year 1 to 6 follow the requirements of the National Curriculum KS1 and KS2 learning objectives for history.
The substantive threads document (attached below) identifies four key threads running through the history topics covered from Year 1 to Year 6. This allows children to build on and consolidate prior knowledge and to develop an understanding of history concepts such as continuity and change. The four threads are:
-Technological change
-Social and cultural change
-Leadership (including monarchy)
-Legacy
Within our History lessons, we will ensure that both our pupils’ substantive and disciplinary knowledge is built upon year on year.
Substantive Knowledge – This is knowledge and ‘substance’ of our curriculum e.g. ‘the facts’ - people, dates, events, the overall ‘knowledge’ of a knowledge block.
Disciplinary Knowledge – This is skills developed to interpret the past, in order to gain the ‘substantive knowledge’ (the ‘substance’) – eg: “how do historians know what they know?” This comes within the skills ladder – e.g. changes, continuation, causes, sources… and are the building blocks that reflect the central concepts and how our whole history curriculum and knowledge blocks connect with one another.
Curriculum Impact
-Children have a clear knowledge of substantive facts for the time periods studied, embedded through flashback work and drawing links between different units studied.
-Children have disciplinary knowledge related to four key areas- shown on the history curriculum map:
-Chronology
-Comparisons, Trends and Significances
-Historical Enquiry
-Vocabulary