History Vision

At Pennington Infant School we believe that History should inspire our pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. History helps pupils to understand the process of change, the diversity of societies as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time.

We intend on delivering the History curriculum looking at changes within living memory, events beyond living memory, the lives of significant individuals and significant historical events, people and places in their own locality through high quality teaching and a range of engaging lessons, hands on experiences and inspirational visitors.

Our History curriculum has been carefully planned in accordance with the Early Years Framework and The National Curriculum where children build on their history skills over time. It is implemented through exciting learning opportunities, the use of technical vocabulary and application of skills through effective progression for each year group so that children embed key learning, knowledge and skills.

We aim to achieve this in the Early years by giving the children opportunities to:

• Talk about members of their immediate family and community
• Name and describe people who are familiar to them
• Comment on images of familiar situations in the past
• Compare and contrast characters from stories including figures from the past

These everyday activities introduce the children to the historical skills of cause and consequence, significance, interpretation, continuity and change, characteristic features of a person/place/event and chronology in a basic way to then be built upon in KS1.

In KS1 children will continue to use these historical skills to undertake enquiry-based learning where they will explore:

• changes within living memory (Toys)
• events beyond living memory that are significant nationally or globally (Great Fire of London)
• the lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements (Christopher Colombus & Neil Armstrong, Florence Knightingale & Mary Seacole, Samuel Pepys)
• significant historical events, people and places in their own locality. (Titanic)

The impact of our history curriculum will equip the children to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments and develop perspective and judgment, which they can use to delve deeper into historical periods in time in KS2.