History
We are Historians!
Mawnan School is principally a place for high quality learning. To facilitate this, we continuously strive to do better for the children in our care so that learning is constantly deepened and the experience improved. We are always striving to try new things, to seek to learn from those experiences, and work to adopt and embed the practices that work best.
Our vision for History, is no different to any subject that we teach – we want to deliver the best possible curriculum we can. We want to be experts so that we can deliver with the expertise that the subject deserves - the expertise that our pupils deserve.
Our vision is to deliver a high-quality, coherent history curriculum which, through increased understanding of the history of Britain and the wider world, allows pupils to be curious and critical about the past. Our ambition is for pupils to become inquisitive about the past so that they better understand their place in the world.
What is our Intent?
At Mawnan School we teach children to understand how events in the past have influenced our lives today; we also teach them to investigate these past events and, by so doing, to develop the skills of enquiry, analysis, interpretation and problem solving.
We strive to promote a variety of historical skills which support the development of knowledge. We also focus on skills and core concepts through enriched cultural capital (the essential knowledge that children need to be educated citizens) and the provision of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge to develop changes in long term memory (learning).
We believe children learn best by having opportunities to revisit previous learning and so have created a well mapped learning journey that gives our pupils the opportunity to embed their understanding into long term memory. Therefore, we teach history in half termly Expeditions, allowing children to build on their previous knowledge so that the children can fully immerse themselves and have opportunities to reflect and build on prior learning.
Our Journey Roadmaps allow each class to develop their prior learning from the previous year. All teachers have been an integral part of creating these Roadmaps which show how Mawnan School will be covering and enriching the national curriculum to ensure deeper understanding for all. In EYFS and KS1 (mixed age classes) the Roadmap is on a 3 year rolling programme, in Year 3- 5 (mixed age classes) the Roadmap is on a 3 year rolling programme and in Year 6 there is an annual Roadmap.
By visiting each of the Class sections of the website http://mawnanschool.com/web/our_classes , you will be given the opportunity to see an Overview document. This will show you the key focuses and questions for each half term. Each teacher uses the full version of this document to create a long term plan for the Expedition. These contain all the information we would require to ensure that our curriculum is as succinct as possible: Intent, Linked Class Text, Cultural Capital, Vocabulary, Skills, Key Concepts, Prior Learning, National Curriculum Coverage and New Learning Focuses.
How do we ensure continuous development?
The teachers at Mawnan have focused on what would need to be put in place to ensure that a History curriculum can be implemented to a standard that we would want for our pupils. As with every subject, we looked at three actions each year: one for the staff based on a Menti questionnaire; one obtained and guided by pupil voice based on a pupil Google Form; and one based on external research e.g. Ofsted review.
How will our curriculum be implemented?
Through ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in history, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. History is taught through two of our six curriculum themes: Ancient Civilisations and History in the UK. History is taught as part of a half-termly Expedition, based on the stated in National Curriculum and focusing on declarative knowledge, substantive knowledge and skills. On re-designing our curriculum, teachers worked in collaboration to ensure knowledge and skills were explicitly and progressively built into sequences of lessons. Staff meeting time is also used effectively, to gather evidence, ensure progression and make adjustments where necessary to enhance pupil engagement.
It is important to us that key concepts are considered as a thread that weaves through our curriculum Voyage and allows the pupils the opportunity to make links between each History Expedition and the wider world.
Four key concepts of History repeat throughout the curriculum. (In brackets, you will see other important related concepts and substantive knowledge that are planned into Expeditions and are implicitly referred to.) These provide lenses through which to consider the different aspects of History:
To be historians we also employ a range of skills that are embedded across a sequence of lessons:
Using these pupils can Research, Compare, Describe, Observe, Identify, Sequence, Understand, Conclude and Make judgements on their journey towards behaving like an historian.
We recognise the importance for children to gain ‘real-life’ experiences through hands-on, practical activities. We ensure this through fieldwork and educational visits.
Carefully chosen, high quality, age appropriate whole class texts are a big part of our curriculum. Where possible these add an extra historical context to the children’s learning and emersion in the subject.
The pupils also have access to a historical fiction section in the library that has been divided into the areas of history that we cover as well as into areas beyond the Mawnan Curriculum such as The Kingdom of Benin and The Shang Dynasty.
Each classroom has invested in sets of some of the most awe-inspiring fiction and non-fiction books that the pupils will draw upon during their learning.
Examples of these can be found in our Reading Roadmaps: