HISTORY AT FAIRLIGHT

Intent, Implementation & Impact of History

Intent

At Fairlight Primary and Nursery School, we value History as a way to explore, question, discuss, and build our own growing views of a diverse world, using all the information available to us.

Our curriculum encourages children to:

·        explore and learn to understand events in the past.

·        explore where we ourselves, our families, and our community stand in history.

·        explore the history of a diverse world of many interconnecting cultures.

·        walk in the shoes of a diverse array of people from the past, and to consider how they thought and felt with their diverse biases - their perspectives or points of view.

·         build up our own synthesis – ‘world view’ - of different eras in the past, using all the information available to us.

·        To learn to ask questions about the past that inspire curiosity and lead to expanding our understanding.

·        appreciate bias as a way to explore different perspectives and points of view of diverse people who lived in a historical era.

·        To learn to examine different forms of evidence: physical, written, visual, and reconstructed.

·        To be able to sequence events in the order in which they happened.

·        To develop our ability to explain the causes and consequences of historical events.

·        To learn how to present our own hypotheses and theories on historical events with the support of evidence and reasoning.

·        To apply our historical skills to the world around us today.

Implementation – How we try to develop these intentions through our learning of history

At Fairlight, we will achieve this by:

·        Creating an immersive experience of history, which inspires pupils to use their creative mind to support their analytical mind in the exploration of history.

·        Interconnecting the study of history with the study of the other humanities of geography and religious study, as well as diverse languages. Making use of the opportunity to also recognise and celebrate the contributions of diverse societies and people to arts, sciences, and politics.

·        Making reference to the eras of history which we study throughout a child’s journey through the school, via timelines, to sequence them chronologically, but also to compare and contrast them to seek out relationships, similarities and differences.

·        Using experimental archaeology, informed role-play, and simulation to allow pupils to use their creative mind to explore historical situations and to formulate their own hypotheses.

·        Exploring the history of our locality, the United Kingdom, and a diverse variety of places and societies.

·        Investigating case studies of significant events in history, to examine the many points of view of people involved, the many factors which caused events, and the many consequences of events.

·        Employing a variety of kinds of information sources for children to explore. This will include primary sources, including especially replicas of physical artefacts.

·        Helping children learn how to formulate question which deepen their investigation of history.

·        Helping children to form and to present their own historical hypotheses (ideas to investigate), opinions (points of view), and syntheses (summaries of the current understanding of a historical event) through conversation, discussion, debate, and writing. This will relate to the use of sentence stems to support effective use of historical language.

 

Impact of Our Learning of History

Our History curriculum is designed so that children leave Fairlight:

·        With a love of history and the desire to seek out and explore its stories and voices.

·        Willing to seek out and listen to the full diversity of voices and perspectives in historical inquiries.

·        Ready to question historical narratives.

Able to use a variety of key vocabulary and sentence structures with which to discuss their historical knowledge and understanding.

·        With an increased critical and analytical thinking, making informed and balanced judgements based on their knowledge of the past, and beginning to apply these to the issues they face in the present.

·        Having developed their awareness of how historical eras and events have shaped the world that they currently live in.

·        Having a greater awareness of our local history and how it was impacted by some world events (such as the Great War).

·        Having a deeper understanding of how events and societies from around the world have contributed to and influenced each other and ourselves, and some ways in which the UK has affected other places (such as India and the British Empire).

·        With more historical skills that enable them to pursue their own interests within a topic via forming effective questions, and examining different kinds of source material.