Stanford Junior and Infant School
Living together - Learning together
The Geography curriculum at Stanford School is unique. It is broad and balanced with a breadth of engaging opportunities. We want to enable children to be secure in their geographical knowledge, as well as having an awareness of being global citizens and an understanding of how we can take better care of our planet by identifying current issues linked to climate change.
The Geography curriculum is purposeful and relevant to the pupils. The knowledge and skills pupils acquire, build on their previous learning, allowing them to transfer key skills, knowledge and concepts to their long-term memories. Geography is carefully planned and sequenced in order to promote progression and development of key skills as children advance through our school.
We focus on learning about human and physical geographical features, introducing children to a wealth of new vocabulary and concepts through a range of meaningful, engaging and relevant contexts. We also encourage enquiry-based learning and use of cross-curricular maths and writing skills through promoting field work as an essential part of geography.
In addition to this, we believe it is important that children are suitably equipped to be able to use and analyse a range of different maps and have secure place knowledge.
In each year group, children focus on important global issues, through their geography, SMSC, RE, science and English lessons, as well as during assemblies and through fundraising.
We are proud of the achievements of our pupils in Geography. Our pupils fluently apply their skills and knowledge within Geography and make connections to their existing knowledge and to other curriculum areas. The impact of the children’s learning in geography can be measured not only in their cross-curricular topic work, but also through our outdoor learning and application of language and knowledge in writing and reading lessons.
A parents guide to the new National Curriculum (not Foundation/Seedlngs class). More information can be found on the Rising Stars website
We have started our learning about Chinese New Year in foundation stage. We have read the story of 'The Great Race' and learned that there are 12 animals which different years are named after. This year is the year of the rabbit, but most of us will have been born in the year of the dog or the rooster. We have enjoyed exploring Chinese food in our takeaway role play area, as well as trying on some traditional Chinese clothing. We have also tried writing and painting some Chinese words and numbers. We have made some Chinese dragons using a concertina effect with card - next week we will be making a big dragon and taking part in a dragon dance. Happy Lunar New Year to all those who celebrate it!
Following on from Remembrance day we decided to go and look at the cenotaph and reflect on the people of Laceby who died in the line of duty.
First we looked at Laceby using ordnance survey and aerial maps then the children plotted the best route to get there.
To ensure road safety we word hi-viz jackets and ensured that we walked safely and carefully through the village.
When we arrived at the cenotaph the children were interested to read the names of the people who had died for their country. We had a minutes silence & reflection then the Year 3 children laid a wreath they had made and the Year 4 children recited poems they had written.
We walked around school to see if we could identify human and physical features. We learnt that human features have been put there by someone and physical features have always been there. We had clipboards so we could draw what we had identified.
Despite it being a very rainy day, Pumpkin Class enjoyed their visit to Tattershall Castle and climbed right to the top! Not only did they learn about the history and uses of the different areas of the castle, they also identified important land features.
S- There was a forest near the castle, that’s where the people would get the wood for their fires.
M- The moat around the castle, kept the people safe inside because it would make it harder to get across.
I-The lake nearby would have given people water to drink and fish to eat.
A-The people could hunt for animals to eat in the forest.
T- The forest would have grown fruit and berries to eat. Sustainability
E- It’s important to look after castles, so they don’t fall down and injure people.
H- I think we should look after our castles and old buildings, so people can visit them, learn about history and enjoy finding things out.
R- It’s so good that people looked after Tattershall Castle, so we can enjoy it. I hope it is still there in hundreds of years!
As Geographers, Year 6 pupils learnt about UK’s trade links with other countries and investigated what we import and where from. We used trading cards and world maps to find the answers.
We were set the task to find Egypt on a world map. We have a huge map on display in our corridor which the children loved looking at. First we named the continents, then we looked for Egypt. We found out that it is in Africa.
Today we have been learning how Geographers use aerial photos and maps to locate places. We became Geographers and located our school, some roads, houses, fields, trees and the church on maps and photos of Laceby. We learnt some new vocabulary as well:
locate which means to find
Aerial which means from up above
We had great fun using new skills. Look at our photos. Next week we plan to do some fieldwork and find different houses in Laceby.
In our Geography lessons this week, we have been enhancing our map reading skills by looking at an Ordnance Survey map of North East Lincolnshire.
We cross-referenced against the OS symbol key to identify landmarks in our local area of Laceby. It was great fun to try to find different areas on the map and to calculate the distance using the scale!
J - I can’t believe how detailed this map is, it’s helped me to see where different places are and how far away from each other they are.
L - I really enjoyed looking at the real map and not just on google. I’ve never seen a paper map before and didn’t understand what the symbols and diagrams meant before today!
A - I recognised seeing some of the symbols on road signs, I didn’t realise there were so many. It’s been really interesting to see what the whole of Grimsby looks like.
In Geography we were locating the 22 countries that make up North America. We used a range of resources, from atlases, globe and IPads to locate them successfully. We then created a kind map to help us remember
As we are learning about the Romans we are also finding out about Italy .
The children thought it was funny as the country looks like a boot. They labelled the different countries surrounding Italy then identified the Italian regions by using a colour coordinated key.
In Juniper class we have been using a world atlas to find out which countries make up Scandinavia and the cities, seas etc that are around these countries.
In Willow class we have been following the story from a wonderful book, called 'The Boy at the Back of the Class', by the author Onjali Q. Rauf. The book tells the story of a young boy called Ahmet, who has travelled as a refugee from Syria to the United Kingdom. We have also compared this story to the book 'The Journey' by Francesca Sanna, which is also a tale about refugees.
From these books, we have produced a lot of purposeful and creative writing. This has included writing letters to politicians to ask for more help to be provided for refugees in crisis. We have also used lots of strategies to add description to our writing, including exploring some exotic fruits (based on some fabulous description of pomegranates in the book).
In addition to this we have completed some comparison work about the UK and Syria in our geography lessons. Learning about refugees through these stories has taught us important skills of empathy and understanding other people.
Our Geography topic this term is Ancient Greeks. We have been using maps and atlases to discover and explore the physical geography of Greece and comparing it to the physical geography of the UK.
We have enjoyed learning about how the terrain can be portrayed in different maps, such as physical, climatic and topographic.
Year 5 have been creating some art for the Spirited Arts competition. This is an annual competition by National Association of Teachers of RE and this year's theme is 'God's Good Earth'.
Children were challenged with creating an environmentally-aware piece of art, linked to their feelings about climate change and nature.
As we are learning about the Maya culture and rainforests we have built a fantastic immersive welcome to excite the children and let them 'step into' this wonderful environment. The children have been busy creating art and writing poems to show how talented we are. Doesn't it look wonderful??
Today we have been looking at how land is used within settlements. We discovered that land can be used for different purposes: business, retail, industry; leisure, housing & agriculture. We decided to take a closer look at our village so we used Google Maps to have a tour of our community. After that we looked at a map of the village and colour coded our village map to show how the land has been used. The children were really excited to look at their homes from an aerial view. We could tell that most of the area is used for housing in Laceby.
In Geography our theme has been the UK. We used an atlas to identify which countries make up the Uk and the major cities. We used the eight compass points to describe the location of the countries and cities of the UK. We also identified the seas and Oceans that surround the UK and the rivers.
