The following guidance may be helpful for teachers who want to review or create their own scheme of work.
Defining a key stage plan
A key stage plan for geography:
- takes account of the circumstances of the school and its aims and purposes;
- is a whole school plan agreed by all staff;
- sets out an agreed time allocation for geography per year for each year group or mixed age class;
- is based on the requirements for geography for the appropriate key stage;
- makes clear school priorities, eg personal, social and health education.
When developing a key stage plan teachers may find it helpful to consider:
- the balance between places, themes and skills;
- how content may best be sequenced;
- how to check children's progress;
- the practicalities of organising teaching geography, eg timing of fieldwork activities during the school year;
- links with other curriculum areas;
- the aims and purposes of geography at key stages 1 and 2, and the subject's contribution to the whole primary curriculum;
- ways in which children make progress in learning geography.
Evaluating geography key stage plans and units
How far do the school's key stage plans and units:
- provide long- and medium-term plans which are clearly linked to the National Curriculum programme of study and level descriptions?
- provide a secure basis from which teachers can plan lessons on a daily or weekly basis to meet the needs of all children in the class?
- show how geographical ideas and skills are built up in an organised, systematic and rigorous way based on learning that has already taken place?
- show links between the areas of the geography curriculum including geographical enquiry skills?
- link teaching activities to the learning they are intended to promote?
- identify what children are expected to learn, both within a unit and by the end of a specified period, and how children's learning might be assessed?
- provide opportunities for the development of literacy, mathematics and IT and, where appropriate, links to other subjects?
- give indications of the time needed to teach each unit?
Evaluating the extent to which a key stage plan encourages progression in children's learning
- What is known about what children have already achieved when they enter the key stage and how does this affect the pitch of the early units?
- Which ideas in geography depend on secure understanding of other ideas?
- How can units be sequenced so that earlier work lays the foundations for later work?
- Are there opportunities for revisiting and reinforcing the ideas children need to understand and which some will find difficult?
- When ideas are revisited or reinforced is it in a different context or using different activities?
- How are children who have some competence or expertise beyond the levels expected in particular years challenged?
Evaluating the extent to which a scheme of work encourages progression in children's learning
How far do the school's key stage plans and units provide opportunities for children, as they move through key stages 1 and 2, to progress:
- from using everyday language to increasingly precise use of geographical vocabulary?
- from personal geographical knowledge of a few areas to understanding of a wider range of areas and links between them?
- from describing events and phenomena to explaining events and phenomena?
- from explaining phenomena in terms of their own ideas to explaining phenomena in terms of accepted ideas or models?
- from participating in practical geographical activities to building increasingly abstract models of real situations?
- from unstructured exploration to more systematic investigation of a question?
- from using simple drawings, maps and diagrams to represent and communicate geographical information to using more conventional maps, diagrams and graphs?
- from guided practical activities in the field to working more independently outside the classroom?
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