Implementation of our History Curriculum

A knowledge organiser is developed for each year group based on the units they cover and their focus genre. These documents are the graphic representation of the key knowledge, vocabulary and images required to form a schema of learning for the particular year group. Lessons are delivered half termly through a combination of music specialists and class teachers.

For modules taught using Charanga units, Charanga Knowledge Organisers present teachers with a familiar graphical representation, highlighting the key facts and ideas that will be covered in the sequence of lessons. These knowledge organisers compliment the Year Group knowledge organisers. Each document also provides teachers with the opportunity to quiz children regularly to ensure that key knowledge is retained in children’s long-term memory.

Using the Knowledge Overview as a medium term document, teachers create short-term plans for individual lessons. This will include the preparation of high quality resources to be shared across classes, year groups and both schools. Teachers ensure that their planning guides the acquisition and retention of new learning through a range of strategies rooted in cognitive science such as the use of retrieval practice.

Starting every lesson with a retrieval activity means children have the opportunity to recall and present their learning to ensure it is committed to long-term memory. Knowledge organisers support the use of retrieval practice because they have been designed to be easily testable by removing key definitions or key words.

New learning is presented in small steps with clear explanations and narratives from the teacher. Children complete tasks and activities linked to these used throughout sequenced lessons. Modelling and guided practise scaffold pupils learning before moving into guided practise to ensure the key knowledge is embedded. Children will demonstrate their learning in lessons through independent tasks, which are accessible to all, but stretch even the most able. Through the repetition of this process learning will be judged by performance in a lesson, but instead as the accumulation of knowledge and understanding of concepts over time.

In order to display the mastery of this knowledge learned it can be applied as a skill in a range of contexts and purposes across topics and, where possible, in other curriculum areas.