At Old Town Infant School and Nursery, we believe the purpose of history is to provide an essential tool for children to make sense of their place in the world and develop a life-long curiosity about the past - and as humans we can change the world by understanding the past and present. We want our pupils to question the world around them and to think critically about changes that have occurred throughout history. We believe that a high-quality history education provides the children with the foundations for them to achieve these skills. Our local and wider history has impacted the world in so many ways, good and bad, and all pupils should be taught essential aspects of the knowledge, in order to learn from history and have an opinion.
Children will be encouraged to pose questions, examine artefacts and use different source material to find similarities and differences across and within different periods of history. They will consider events of local, national and international importance and will discuss how life was different for people in contrasting periods of the past.
At Old Town, we ensure the History curriculum is accessible to all pupils through differentiation for individual abilities. The children will often be given opportunities to focus their own learning by identifying famous people and places to study or setting questions to answer. They will discuss how the past is represented in different ways and why there may be differing explanations for events.
In the Foundation Stage, the children will look specifically at their own lives, talk about past and present events of theirs and their families, before moving on to consider other people’s lives, and how they were different in the past. We want our children leaving Reception to really understand and discover their past and present lives and that of their families, in order for them to gain the skills to understand that there is a past and things can change over time.
In Key Stage 1 we further develop children’s knowledge, research skills and also their understanding. We encourage children to ask, as well as answer questions about not only what they do not know, but also looking at the things they want to know. They will use a range of research methods to enhance their learning. Wherever possible, the children are involved in ‘real’ historical activities e.g. creating their own history here at school, time capsules, drama (to provide them with an understanding of how people may have felt in the past). We also utilise the skills and knowledge around us by inviting visitors into school, going on school trips and celebrating our country's history (Remembrance Day, Queen’s Jubilee), as well as learning about important and inspirational people in history (Greta Thunberg, David Attenbourgh).
Unfortunately not the ones with chocolate chips.
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