Geography | King Richard III Infant and Nursery School

Geography

Geography at King Richard III Infant and Nursery School

At King Richard III, we define Geography as the learning and comparison of different places in the world, the human and physical features within it and the people who live there. With our curriculum, we aim to take the children on an exploration through carefully chosen places in the United Kingdom and Planet Earth, discovering and retaining knowledge of their unique climates, inhabitants and features. Our pupils then always seek to compare and contrast them to our own surroundings in urban Leicester, which allows them to fully answer our key geographical question: Where do I live and how is it different to others? To enable this, the curriculum is split into the three key geographical strands of Location and Place Knowledge, Human and Physical Geography and Geographical Skills and Fieldwork with each year group covering a variety of topics within each strand.

As in all subject areas, we recognise the importance of every child being given the opportunity to enquire and investigate areas that pique their curiosity. Our children are therefore encouraged to take ownership of their learning and celebrate their diverse backgrounds and cultures by becoming 'experts' in their family's original countries and birthplaces. Using their oracy skills that they have developed across the wider curriculum, they are then challenged to teach their peers all about life in these places that many of us will not have been able to experience.

Alongside this, we intend that every child can leave our school with the skills and confidence to be a navigator, an explorer and to be able to speak as a geographer. A cornerstone of our Geography curriculum is the focus on mapping and map-reading skills, whereby children start with simple story maps and journey through maps from different points in history, different representations of the same places in map form, and increasingly more complex keys and symbols, to become proficient map readers, able to solve and explain navigational problems using their geographical knowledge and understanding.

To make the learning of Geography active and meaningful, we regularly take children out and about in the school grounds and where possible, around our city. This helps those geographical skills be developed and using them in real-life contexts makes them memorable, so that they can be referred back to for the rest of an individual's life.

By the time children leave our school, we hope they have a passion for exploring the outdoor world, an understanding and respect of different cultures both within our country and others, and many transferable skills applicable to use in the real world for years to come.

Please see below for our school's Geography Overview and Long Term Plans for each year group: