History at Scunthorpe Church Of England Primary School
At Scunthorpe Church of England Primary, we believe a high-quality History education will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time.
Aims of the History Curriculum
The national curriculum for history aims to ensure that all pupils:
- know and understand the history of Britain as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world
- know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies; achievements and follies of mankind
- gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’
- understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses
- 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, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.
Long Term Overview
Knowledge Organisers
At Scunthorpe C of E we use knowledge organisers to help us gather and remember key information. This ‘sticky knowledge’ is so helpful to our future learning as it helps us to ask questions and compare different time periods and events. You can find examples of our knowledge organisers below.
Thinking like an historian!
Disciplinary Knowledge is knowledge about how historians investigate the past, and how they construct historical claims, arguments and accounts - i.e. it is the knowledge of how to undertake a historical enquiry and how we think like historians. Pupils learn disciplinary knowledge within relevant historical contexts (i.e. the substantive topics such as Ancient Greece) - through application to substantive knowledge. Our units of learning are framed around central Enquiry Questions which focus a unit of work on elements of this disciplinary knowledge.
This knowledge of historical enquiry frames what pupils learn about the past, supporting them to consider the status of historical claims. It enables them to place their historical knowledge in a broad context. It helps pupils to understand the different versions of the past can be constructed, and that historical narrative is partially dependent upon viewpoint.
Disciplinary knowledge is concerned with developing historical rational and critical thinking within enquiry, and can be categorised into 6 Disciplinary concepts that are systematically developed in our history curriculum:
• Historical Enquiry - asking questions, using sources and evidence to construct and challenge the past, and communicating ideas
• Cause and Consequence - selecting and combining information that might be deemed a cause and shaping it into a coherent causal explanation and understanding the relationship between an event and other future events.
• Change and continuity - analysing the pace, nature and extent of change.
• Similarity and difference - analysing the extent and type of difference between people, groups, experiences or places in the same historical period.
• Historical significance - understanding how and why historical events, trends and individuals are thought of as being important.
• Historical interpretations - understanding how and why different accounts of the past are constructed
Vocabulary
