Geography

We have recently been awarded the Primary Geography Quality Mark Silver Award! Click on the logo to find out more.

Geography was a major priority for the school last year. Throughout the year all the staff put a lot of hard work into delivering a geography curriculum that would enable the children to really progress in the subject. As a result, both attainment within the subject and the children’s enjoyment of geography has increased significantly.

One of the first things we did was to change and rewrite many of the geography units of work. The changes were based on what the children told us they would like to learn about. We have made the units more fun, more creative and more practical. At the same time we have enhanced core geography skills like map reading and map creating.

We have continued to look at geographical issues both local and global. We have also embedded ICT into the curriculum to support and extend learning in geography. And of course, we continue to use field visits as a primary source for geographical learning. Our new units are:

Year 1:

Around our school

A woodland environment

Kenya

Year2:

The Arctic

Where does our food come from?

Going to the seaside

Year 3:

Weather around the world

Brazil

Local area – improving our world through our window

Year4:

Mountains and volcanoes

A village in India

Village settlers

Year5:

The environment – Sri Lanka

Europe

London

Year 6:

Rivers

The Caribbean

To further raise the profile of the subject we also ran a school wide competition that was a great success. How many countries on a blank world map could you name? Later this term we will be introducing another, slightly shorter, competition to keep all our wonderful geographer’s happy here at Gospel Oak. Have a look at some of them in action and some of the great work they have been producing.


Year 2 working hard on their Arctic boxes!		“Brrrrr!” looks icy cold in there. These Year 2 boxes show some of what they have learned about conditions in the Arctic.

	Year 3 classroom display. We’ll have some future Weather forecasters in that year group!

Last year’s Geography competition was a great success.		An example of Year 6 using ICT to present research they carried out on St Lucia.

Reception visit the fire station as part of their work on getting to know the local environment.

Year 5 visit the Thames Barrier as part of their work on the Water Cycle.

Year 6 visit Epping Forest in order to undertake a river study. They enjoyed measuring mud!

Last Updated May 2009