History
Subject lead: Mrs Williams Strategic Leads: Miss Boult & Miss Swindells
Our aim is to ensure that all pupils are able to develop their historical skills, vocabulary and chronological understanding throughout all areas of the History curriculum. We further aim to deepen pupils’ knowledge and understanding of historical eras and significant events and individuals, allowing them to develop an understanding of how the past influences our present. We aim to ensure all pupils’ can confidently recall historical information and make links between historical eras.
At Whitby Heath, teachers use Quality First Teaching to allow children to gain History knowledge, develop their historical skills and their vocabulary. We aim for children to develop their substantive knowledge (relating to chronological understanding; knowledge and understanding of past events, people and changes in the past; historical interpretation; organisation and communication and historical enquiry) and disciplinary knowledge (how historians interact with these ideas). Furthermore, our curriculum fulfils the ‘big ideas of history’, to ensure that children are developing their knowledge and skills over time. This allows children to gain an understanding of the past and how it affects our present and future. This allows them to see themselves as part of a bigger history picture in the world, in particular challenges that face the environment and challenges in society.
At Whitby Heath, we follow the scheme ‘Rising Stars’ progressive History scheme, to help deliver lessons to the children. These lessons have been adapted, as well as resources created, by class teachers to ensure that all children are able to access the curriculum, to all, including those with SEND.
Our curriculum is enquiry based, where each History unit has an overarching question for the half term. Each lesson has an individual enquiry question that will be explored, which will further answer the overarching question. From this, lessons are designed in small steps, to ensure children’s working memory is engaged. Class teachers adapt the plans based on the needs of the children in their class, to create engaging and stimulating lessons which will inspire them in their History learning. In this, each key strand of History chronological understanding; knowledge and understanding of past events, people and changes in the past; historical interpretation; organisation and communication and historical enquiry is explored every unit, to ensure that all children have a breadth of historical understanding. We recognise that new knowledge can be fragile, therefore we used spaced retrieval practices to aid retention of the knowledge into the long-term memory, as well as making cross-curricular links across the subject, to ensuring that children have detailed schemata.
In Key Stage 1 and 2, History is taught termly in weekly, hourly lessons. This allows for time to be spent developing children’s historical skills, one important way being, through fieldwork. Three History units are taught across an academic year, across 3 half terms.