History
Intent
At Cottingley Village Primary School we aim to provide our children with a relevant and challenging History curriculum that is engaging, sparks their curiosity and enables them to develop as young Historians.
We want our children to understand more about the lives of significant people and events from the past and most importantly, the impact that these things have on lives today. Our Curriculum has been designed to ensure that our children develop an awareness of the relationships between different groups of people who have lived in the past, the challenges they faced and strategies they used to overcome them.
We strive to develop our children’s critical thinking and reasoning skills, together with their ability to ask considered questions as they make judgements based on evidence and information that is presented to them. We encourage our children to show compassion for dilemmas that people in the past have faced, whilst developing their notion of what is right and wrong.
Our History curriculum allows us to examine the differing cultural heritage of our children and enables them to build a sense of identity and belonging through the exploration of events at a local, national and global level.
Implementation
Through our Learning Challenge Curriculum from EYFS to Year Six, our children work as Historians, developing knowledge and skills to answer and reflect upon key questions in every theme. History lessons are blocked to enable our children to
immerse themselves in the learning. Our curriculum has been designed to enable our children to consolidate, build upon and deepen their enquiry-based learning and critical thinking skills through a progression in understanding key historical concepts as they journey through our school. Children are introduced to and build upon a range of progressive concepts including change, cause and consequence, similarity and difference, significance, chronology, empathy and perspective.
Through the use of bespoke continuous provision in the form of timelines, we develop and deepen our children’s sense of chronology of the past.
As a school we are members of the Historical Association which provide our teachers with high quality resources to support learning. We have achieved the Silver Mark from the Historical Association and are currently working towards achieving Gold.
Impact
Teachers use a range of tools including quizzing, observations, ICT, oracy , debate and children’s own reflections of their learning to ensure that our pupils are developing an understanding of change over time in people places, events and different cultures. They know about different periods in our history through the guidance of the National Curriculum; significant people who have contributed to make Britain how it is today and have a secure chronological understanding of how British history has developed over time. Our children have the skills to know the range of evidence that can provide us with information about the past and critically evaluate what is presented to them with justified conclusions.