Geography

Geography at Newburn Manor

From the moment we are born, we have a natural inquisitiveness to explore the world around us. At Newburn Manor, we want to nurture this innate curiosity, shaping it to help our pupils become critical thinkers who look closely at the world around them and understand what they see. We want our geography teaching to promote an interest and wonder about people and places, whilst allowing pupils to make sense of the changing world around them and how to best look after it for the future. 

Each year group has two to three geography units. From Early Years onwards, the geography units, and the skills and key concepts they focus on, have been specifically chosen to build on pupils' prior learning and give them the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of places, communities and geographical issues. This can be seen in the whole school overview below. 

When Geography is scheduled to be taught, in Y1-6, it will be taught for at least one hour per week. It will be taught in the order set out in the overview - the units have been carefully placed to allow pupils to make links to other areas of learning, appropriate times of the year for fieldwork and to ensure there is good coverage of skills throughout each key stage. The teaching of geography in Reception is formulated around the Early Learning Goals, whilst still preparing our pupils for Y1 and beyond. Reception will be taught in shorter bursts with important focus on the immediate world around them. They will also have the opportunity to explore geography through play in their classroom. 

Central to the teaching of geography will be development of location and place knowledge, planning and decision making, understanding of cause and effect, identifying change and physical systems and processes, thus equipping the children with a skillset allowing them to adequately tackle the challenges of the modern world. Fieldwork and map skills will be a common thread running throughout our geographical learning - pupils will have the opportunity for at least one fieldwork investigation each academic year. 

We want our children to be ready for the next stage of their geography education, but to also have a solid foundation for their own understanding of their world. Geographical literacy is of great importance within our curriculum and we want our children to develop subject specific vocabulary that they can use effectively in written and spoken form.