Aims and Purpose
History-Statement of Intent
At Sacred Heart RC Primary and Nursery School we aim to provide children with a wide variety of experiences both in and out of school. Museum Loans are used to make history real for the children and encourage an inquisitive mind. Wherever possible, children will have the opportunity to meet visitors or visit sites to enhance their studies; making History enjoyable, memorable and real. Children are encouraged to regularly make links, identifying the similarities and differences, between the different societies, both in England and the wider world. We teach the pupils a sense of chronology and through this they develop a sense of identity and an awareness of the challenges of their time. We endeavour to make History inclusive for all children, including those with additional needs, Pupil Premium and Gifted and Talented children. We aim to offer a high-quality history education that will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence and develop perspective and judgement. History helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups. It also helps children gain a sense of their own identity within a social, political, cultural and economic background. Because of this, we feel it is important for the subject to be taught discretely as well as incorporated within other curriculum subjects such as English and Art.
Our History curriculum aims to excite the children and allow them to develop their own skills as historians. We encourage regular references to timelines and how topics fit together as well as a hands-on approach involving artefacts and wider world experiences where appropriate so as to bring history alive to our young learners. We provide opportunities for cross curricular links to be made to ensure the children have many occasions where by they can apply their knowledge and understanding.
Process for teaching history:
We use artefacts to encourage the children to become history detectives by getting them to think about what the artefact is for, where it is from and how old it is. Artefacts help pupils question and understand the past.
We access resources in our local and wider world inviting people into school to talk about, demonstrate or re-enact aspects or periods in history to help bringing history alive to the children and provide them with a more visual view of the topic they are covering. We use ICT to support learning and make the curriculum accessible for everyone.
We use timelines to help students construct an understanding of historical events over time and begin each topic with action timeline including knowledge from previous years teaching. Literature, artefacts and various sources are used to show, model, and help pupils develop concepts about time, continuity, and change in social studies.
At the end of each topic we assess the knowledge the pupils have gained and use this to inform future learning.