History

At Christ Church, we want every child to be happy and enthusiastic learners of History. Our history curriculum is based around our core values:  Successful Happy Included Nurtured Enriched and follows the National Curriculum guidance for Early Years, Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2.

Through our history curriculum, we aim to help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. We believe the study of History inspires children's curiosity, and helps children gain a sense of their own identity within a social, cultural, political and economic background.

We aim for every child to develop:

• An excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events, and contexts from a range of historical periods and of historical concepts and processes.
• The ability to think critically about history and communicate ideas very confidently in styles appropriate to a range of audiences.
• The ability to consistently support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using detailed, appropriate and accurate historical evidence derived from a range of sources.
• The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past, formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry.
• A passion for history and an enthusiastic engagement in learning, which develops their sense of curiosity about the past and their understanding of how and why people interpret the past in different ways.
• A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make robust and critical use of it to support their explanations and judgments.
• A desire to embrace challenging activities, including opportunities to undertake high-quality research across a range of history topics.

In Focus Provision children will have the opportunity to:

• Engage in activities to develop skills linked to personal targets.
• Fully immerse themselves into all aspects of the curriculum in an engaging, motivating way which is purposeful to the learners.
• Engage in calming sensory based history activities and lessons to enrich the children’s experiences of different historical events that are meaningful to them.
• Engage in opportunities that broaden children's knowledge and understanding whilst making comparisons about the  past and the present.
• Extend and develop their language around past and present topics.

In EYFS children will have the opportunity to:

• Begin to make sense of their own life-story and family’s history.
• Comment on images of familiar situations in the past.
• Talk about the lives of the people around them and their roles in society.
• Learn some similarities and differences between things in the past and now, drawing on their experiences and what has been read in class.
• Understand the past through settings, characters and events encountered in books read in class and storytelling.

In Key Stage 1 children will have the opportunity to:

• Learn about the lives of significant individuals in Britain’s past who have contributed to national and international achievements – comparing aspects of life in different periods (for example – Mary Seacole, Florence Nightingale, Robert Falcon Scott, Samuel Pepys, Clement Atlee)
• Study key events in the past that are significant nationally and globally, particularly those that coincide with festivals or other events that are commemorated throughout the year (for example - The Great Fire of London, Crimean War, Establishment of the NHS)
• Learn about significant historical events, people and places in their own locality

In Key Stage 2 children will have the opportunity to:

• Follow the key historical themes to investigate and interpret the past, build an overview of world history, develop a chronologically secure knowledge and to communicate using historical terms
• In Year 3 the children will study: Ancient Greece, Roman Empire and Pompeii, Changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age.
• In Year 4 the children will study: Ancient Egypt, Roman Empire and it’s impact upon Britain (including Boudicca), the theme of Industrialisation - The growth of railways and the British Seaside.
• In Year 5 the children will study: Invaders (the Viking and Anglo Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor), Mayan Civilization, Local Study - ‘Industrialisation’ (continuing from Year 4).
• In Year 6 the children will study: What is the cost of war? (a significant turning point in British history – WW2 – Battle of Britain), a local history study (Coventry bombings, Smethwick factories), the Development of Civil Rights - comparing key historical figures throughout history, a child led historical enquiry of their choosing.