Our history curriculum intends to develop pupils who are inquisitive learners, with a wide variety of investigative skills that they can use across the curriculum and for their own enjoyment.

At Ridgeway we we teach history every other half term to ensure that the children can fully immerse themselves and have opportunities to reflect and build on prior learning and skills.  We carefully link learning to other areas of the curriculum, particularly Geography in order to provide a cohesive and broad learning experience.

The History curriculum aims to ensure that all children:

• know and understand history as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day.
• know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world.
• understand historical concepts to make connections and draw contrasts.
• understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed.
• gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts.

Implementation

Children will learn about changes within living memory, events beyond living memory that are significant nationally or globally, the lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements and significant historical events, people and places in our own locality.

Skills and techniques

Children will learn a range of enquiry skills and techniques, they will use a wide vocabulary of everyday historical terms. They will ask and answer questions, choosing and using parts of stories and other sources to show that they know and understand key features of events. They will understand some of the ways in which we find out about the past and identify different ways in which it is represented.

Throughout their Ridgeway journey, our children will continue to develop a chronologically secure knowledge and understanding of British, local and world history, establishing clear narratives within and across the periods they study. They will be taught to note connections, contrasts and trends over time and develop the appropriate use of historical terms. They will be taught to regularly address and sometimes devise historically valid questions about change, cause, similarity and difference, and significance. They will learn how our knowledge of the past is constructed from a range of sources.

The Early Year Foundation Stage children will talk about the lives of people around them and their roles in society, know some similarities and differences between things in the past and now, drawing on their experiences and what has been read in class and understand the past through settings, characters and events encountered in books read in class and storytelling.

Impact

The successful approach at Ridgeway results in a fun, engaging and high–quality history education that provides children with the foundations and knowledge to nurture 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.

Our children will have the ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past, formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry.  They will have an excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events, and contexts from a range of historical periods and of historical concepts and processes.