In our school we encourage children to gain an awareness of the world around them and to think about the effect people have upon it. Skills are taught progressively from Reception to year 6, with opportunities for children to build on and embed their learning. The children complete retrieval grids to show their understanding before and after the topic.
By Year 3, in the Autumn Term, the children are building on their mapwork skills by recapping their knowledge of continents and countries, in their ‘Around the World’ topic. They have then learned about places in the UK and developed our understanding of different settlements such as cities, towns and villages. Then, they compared two UK cities (Norwich and Birmingham), and even challenged themselves further by extending their map skills while learning about grid references.
In Autumn Term, year 5 have been learning about earthquakes, building on prior learning about mountains and volcanoes, talking about plate tectonics and the “Ring of Fire.” They also researched how earthquakes are measured and studied an earthquake in Chile.
The children are encouraged to record their work in various ways, to appeal to various learning styles and use these additional opportunities to practise their SPAG skills and presentation of their work. We make links with local events and discuss things which are happening globally as they occur, especially when the children have encountered them on their television or have been affected by these occurrences, such as local flooding.