Intent

At Rockcliffe, we want to nurture a love and interest in the past.  We want children to understand global, British and local history and to develop the skills required to be a successful historian. Our curriculum has been designed and shaped to allow children to explore and develop an interest through studying a range of time periods.  We strive for our children to recognise their place in time and be fascinated by the rich history of our school and local area. We believe that by developing historical skills, we are helping to make children successful learners, confident individuals and responsible individuals. 

Implementation

History is a central part of the Rockcliffe curriculum and is taught as part of weekly topic lessons on a range of historical scales throughout the year.  History is taught as part of a two-year rolling curriculum across Key Stage 1 and 2. Our topics are centred on meeting requirements on the National curriculum whilst also being shaped to be relevant and interesting to our children.  Lessons are planned to meet specific milestone targets in order to ensure both historical knowledge and skills are attained.  Each lesson is linked to a skillset based on the skills necessary to be an historian as part of our desire for children to be successful and skilled learners.

Across school, children learn to:

·       Investigate and interpret the past: learning to use historical sources and apply these in enquiry.

·       Build an overview of world history: Understanding events of a range of scales and their significance in the period studied and history overall.

·       To understand chronology:  Recognising the concept of chronology and developing the skills of understanding how to date events.

·       Communicate historically: Learning to use historical vocabulary of time and related to large historical concepts.

These over-arching skills are broken down into appropriate milestones for Eearly Years, Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 to ensure progression and consistency across school.

Children are given the opportunity to handle and observe different types of historical sources, such as photos, objects to handle, aerial photos and oral history.  Throughout school, educational visits and workshops are planned when appropriate to enrich the experience of children and further their learning and interest of their historical learning. The classroom environments have timelines and vocabulary to support all learners.  Links are made to the local and school community such as with our Heritage project and work with the TVLB to provide expert knowledge and support to our learning. The History focus is linked across the wider curriculum, such as artwork, design and technology and English units.

Impact

Our History curriculum is age appropriate and is designed to show progression across the main historical skills; Investigating and interpreting the past, building an overview of world history, understanding chronology and communicating historically. These main areas of the curriculum are broken down into milestones to be assessed across both key stages at the end of the school year.