At St. Michaels we provide high quality History teaching through our Explore Curriculum. Underpinned by the National Curriculum, our History curriculum holds our children and their aspirations, environment and development at its heart.

Our curriculum allows our children to build a secure understanding of the past through exploring British history, as well as embracing our multicultural St. Michael’s school community, whilst learning about the history of the wider world. Our History curriculum promotes curiosity and a love and thirst for learning. It is ambitious and empowers our children from EYFS to Year 6 as they explore and develop a rich knowledge of the past. By the time our children reach the end of their primary journey we endeavour for them to have the ability to communicate effectively using a broad and varied historical vocabulary obtained from both explicit teaching, spaced retrieval practice and exposure to high quality texts.

Our progressive curriculum addresses and constantly explores and revisits the key Substantive knowledge (the historical facts and the concepts of History such as invasion, monarchy, tax and empire) through carefully organised manageable chunks designed to build schema and support children’s cognitive load. Through high quality teaching, children are exposed to the Disciplinary knowledge (how historians study the past) within the History curriculum such as ‘Thinking like a Historian’ and accepting that History is an evolving subject, open to debate and challenge as we work towards understanding our world better. All of this rich Historical knowledge is taught through meaningful and authentic examples and is practiced in our regular retrieval activities to ensure that our children know more and remember more.

The main aim of our History curriculum is to:

Develop a higher level of Historical vocabulary used by our children from EYFS to Y6. This development of vocabulary should be well sequenced to ensure progression and challenge as the children progress through the school.

Teach vocabulary explicitly throughout every History lesson using our whole school techniques such as ‘My turn, your turn’, using a variety of voices for repetition and the ‘Word Aware rap’ where appropriate.

Use high quality texts to supplement our History curriculum where appropriate, providing opportunities for children to see History content in books they enjoy and to support our School Improvement priority of improving reading across the school.

Through an ambitious curriculum, develop children’s chronological knowledge of Britain’s past and that of the wider world and develop knowledge of how the past has had an influence on present life.

To ensure that the coherent, chronological and rigorous structure of our curriculum prepares our children for the new historical knowledge that they will learn because of the rich knowledge that they have already secured. The building up of a mental timeline provides opportunities for our children to connect what they have learned.

Develop children’s understanding of historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity and difference and significance.

Develop children’s knowledge of how historians study the past and construct their accounts through meaningful examples.

To continue to successfully implement the ‘Opening Worlds Humanities’ programme across the KS2. The aspects that are effective will be rolled out and adopted by other year groups in KS1 to ensure consistency in the teaching of History.

The children in Year 2 became intrepid reporters and interviewed significant individuals about the Great Fire of London!

Year 4 were lucky enough to take a visit to the city of Chester, where there was a lot of Roman history to experience. The children made their presence known by practising marching cries and shield formations. They also learned about how fearless the Romans were during war and conflict and got they entertained themselves with gladiator battles in the famous Roman Amphitheatre.

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