History 

Intent 

At Bordon Infant School, we provide children with the fundamental skills to be historians. Through instilling a passion and love of history we have high aspirations for our children without boundaries or limitations. 

Through the teaching of History, we stimulate all children’s interest and understanding about the life of people who lived in the past. We teach children a sense of chronology, to enable children to contextualise and understand the significance of events and how they have impacted our lives today. 

We raise children’s awareness of significant historical events and the importance of people’s actions. We also learn how these actions have affected change with the passing of time. Furthermore, our children will learn about aspects of local, British and worldwide history. We believe that by allowing the children to understand the importance and enjoyment of History through different opportunities, they will become enthused historians. 

Implementation 

Across the school Topics are blocked to allow children to focus on developing their knowledge and skills, studying each topic in depth. Consequently, we have developed a progression of skills within each year group, enabling pupils to build and develop their historical skills and understanding. 

EYFS 

The Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum supports children’s understanding of History through the planning and teaching of ‘Understanding the World’. This contextualises how children find out about past and present events in their own lives, their families and other people they know. Children are encouraged to begin to comprehend changes that happen over time and are given opportunities to differentiate between past and present through topics such as ‘toys’, growing plants, observing the seasons and time and looking at photographs of their life and of others. We promote children’s investigative behaviour and pose questions such as, ‘What do you think?’, ‘Tell me more about?’, ‘What will happen if..?’, ‘What else could we try?’, ‘What could it be used for?’ and ‘How might it work?’ Use of language relating to time is used in daily routines and conversations with children for example, ‘yesterday’, ‘old’, ‘past’, ‘now’ and ‘then’. 

Throughout KS1, History begins by looking at changes within living memory and beyond and introduces children to the idea of chronology and timelines. History will look at significant events and people who have shaped society, locally, nationally and globally. 

In Year 2 children learn about British History which builds on events they have learnt from year one to deepen their chronological understanding allowing children to confidently place events during time periods. This allows pupils to consistently build on prior knowledge and learning by placing previously taught History topics on a timeline. 

In order to support children in their acquisition and retention of knowledge, there are regular opportunities to review learning that has taken place in previous topics as well as previous lessons. 

At the start of each topic children are immersed in a ‘WOW’ experience to provide them with the opportunity to share their existing knowledge as well as acquire new. 

Medium term planning for all units covers key historical concepts: Chronological understanding, knowledge, interpretation, enquiry, organisation and communication. 

Children are given opportunities, where possible, to study artefacts leading to enquiry, investigation, analysis, interpretation, evaluation and presentation. 

We plan for effective use of educational visits to enrich and enhance.

We plan for effective use of educational visits to enrich and enhance the pupil’s learning experience and the History curriculum such as a trip to the local military cemetery. 

Teachers use effective assessment of children’s prior and existing knowledge and use this as a foundation for learning. Children acquire knowledge from a range of sources with teachers assessing learning progressively to influence future lessons. Through using a range of assessment tools, differentiation is facilitated by teachers, to ensure that each pupil can access the History curriculum. Children are given clear success criteria in order to achieve the learning objective with differing elements of independence. 

Cross-curricular links are planned for, with other subjects such as Writing, Computing, DT. 

Impact 

The impact of this curriculum design will aim to show clear progress across the year groups and development of children’s key historical knowledge and skills. As a result, we aim for children to leave Bordon Infants with a key foundation of skills and attributes for which they can utilise throughout their educational journey and lives.