Geography is learning about the world and the behaviour of humans.
At St Anthony’s Catholic Primary we believe God created Earth and human beings, and acknowledge we have a duty to respect and care for Earth’s goodness and each other. Geography helps us to make sense of our surroundings, cultures and the wider world, as well as reflect upon the impact our lives have on our own and other environments.
Intent:
At St Anthony’s we are committed to ensuring that children receive a broad, balanced and relevant curriculum, which is fully inclusive to every child. Our aims are not only to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for Geography, but to make it relevant for our children. We aim to do this by making links, where possible, to other curriculum subjects, but more importantly, by making the Geography curriculum relevant to our location: Preston, Lancashire.
We aim to inspire St Anthony’s children to develop a fascination and curiosity about the world, its people and different geographical processes. As an investigative subject, we intend to provoke thought, questions and to encourage children to discover answers to their own questions through exploration and research. We intend to equip our children with geographical skills to develop their knowledge about diverse places, physical environments and the human interaction with these environments, in order to facilitate an understanding of the world we live in and how we can care for it, as God expects us to.
Implementation
We use the National Curriculum for Geography as a basis for our curriculum planning. With consideration to our mixed year group classes, units of work are set out in long term plans over a two-year cycle with cross-curricular links to other curriculum subjects made and, where possible, with local relevance for our children. There are no longer any set 6 week Geography units: this allows for flexibility and cohesion with other curriculum subjects.
Teachers have identified the key knowledge and skills of each unit of work and consideration has been given to ensure progression of these across the school.
Units of work include the four core areas of Geography taught over the year, with geographical skills and knowledge being revisited in order to embed and deepen understanding. At the beginning of each topic, children are able to convey what they know already and what they would like to find out. This, along with discussions with previous year group teachers, helps to identify any gaps in learning and informs the planning, ensuring the lessons are relevant and take into account children’s different starting points. Teachers use a range of approaches to ensure accessibility for all, as well as provide appropriate challenge to different groups of learners. Such approaches include: teacher presentations; research based activities; discussions and debates; investigating maps and photographs and digital mapping. Furthermore, in KS1, learning can take place through independent ‘learning zone’ opportunities that are carefully planned for and tailored to the curriculum.
Teachers are encouraged to consider opportunities to get out of the classroom and to use the school grounds and local area for fieldwork in each unit of work, enabling children to base learning on first hand experiences to enhance teaching and learning in Geography. Trips and visitors are encouraged to enhance the learning experiences for the children.
Early Years Foundation Stage
Aspects of Geography appear within the area of learning called Understanding the World in the EYFS Framework, which is the curriculum for our Reception children. It is an integral part of topic work covered during the year. Teachers use a further highly recommended document called ‘Development Matters’ to aid their planning and implement a range of opportunities to develop children’s own sense of their physical world and their community.
Impact
The impact of our Geography curriculum is that our children are equipped with the geographical skills and knowledge to explore, navigate and understand the world around them and their place in it.
Assessment is ongoing and teachers will focus on the individual’s personal competence and understanding through: discussions; observations; recordings; use of equipment and investigations. A summative assessment, which reflects the Geography National Curriculum and the Lancashire KLIPs documents for KS1; Lower KS2 & Upper KS2 is completed at the end of each Geography unit and used to inform future planning.
Fairtrade at St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School
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Fairtrade at St Anthony’s Catholic Primary 2024
2024 is the 30th Anniversary Year of the Fairtrade mark in the UK.
It is also the 20th Anniversary Year of Preston becoming a Fairtrade city.
St Anthony’s is committed to supporting, using and promoting Fairtrade, wherever possible. We believe Fairtrade can make a difference to the lives of young people and their families throughout the world by improving living and working conditions for people who grow the things we buy.
At St Anthony’s we have an established Fairtrade Warrior group comprising of KS2 pupils that meet regularly to promote Fairtrade in the school.
We have achieved the highest level of the national school award accredited by the Fairtrade Foundation, known as the FairAchiever Schools Award.
Our Fairtrade Warriors raise awareness and support Fairtrade through many different activities including: delivering whole school assemblies; fundraising events; promoting Fairtrade products to visitors to our school; embedding Fairtrade within our Geography lessons; having a whole school policy and by attending regular Fairtrade Warrior meetings.
In Spring 2024, St Anthony’s Fairtrade Warriors were invited to support Preston’s 20th Anniversary Year Fairtrade Project by designing and creating paper mache Fairtrade Eggs. These were displayed around Preston’s shops and businesses to promote Fairtrade and encourage children to participate in the Great Fairtrade Easter Egg Hunt. Some of our children were lucky enough to complete this egg hunt with their parents during the Easter holidays and collect a chocolate egg reward!
September 2024 saw the launch of Fairtrade Fortnight nationwide with the theme of ‘Be the Change’. As part of this campaign St Anthony’s FTW contacted their local Member of Parliament, Sir Mark Hendrick, asking him to sign the pledge ‘Be the Change’. This pledge asked him to make a simple personal commitment to work with Fairtrade and fair trade campaigners here in the UK, and to listen to farmers and workers around the world, to make sure policies developed at Westminster contribute to a future that is fair for all.
To further support this, our FTWs have recently launched their own school campaign called:
‘Be the Change- Save the Change’. This is an inter-class competition to raise money for the Fairtrade Foundation. Each class has been given a special ‘Save the Change’ bottle (designed by the FTWs) to try and fill with loose change brought in from home. They decided upon having reward incentive lines marked on the bottles and provided a list of suggestions for classes to agree on and be rewarded with, as they fill their bottle to the top! It’s proving to be quite competitive so far!
Our achievements
