History

History at KINS

Curriculum Intent

At Killamarsh Infant and Nursery School, our History topics form our termly topics. We aim to offer a high-quality history education that 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

The national curriculum for history aims to ensure that all pupils:

• know and understand the history of these islands 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

Curriculum Implementation

Our History curriculum aims to excite the children and allow them to develop their own skills as historians. As part of a topic lead programme it allows opportunities for cross curricular links to be made to ensure the children have many occasions where by they can apply their knowledge and understanding.

EYFS

Children at the expected level of development will:

• talk about the lives of the people around them and their roles in society;
• know some similarities and differences between things in the past and now, drawing on their experiences and what has been read in class;
• understand the past through settings, characters and events encountered in books read in class and storytelling.

In their short lives children have little understanding of time, to them a week is a very long time! 

At KINS we start with what is known and understood by the children then extending it from that point by providing them with a range of wider experiences;

• the known to the unknown
• the familiar to the unfamiliar
• the local to the global
• the first-hand to the secondary.

Fundamentally we believe the environment is critical in ensuring children are provided with opportunities to explore and interact with resources from both past and present. 

Key stage 1

Pupils develop an awareness of the past, using common words and phrases relating to the passing of time. They know where the people and events they study fit within a chronological framework and identify similarities and differences between ways of life in different periods. They use a wide vocabulary of everyday historical terms. They ask and answer questions, choosing and using parts of stories and other sources to show that they know and understand key features of events. They understand some of the ways in which we find out about the past and identify different ways in which it is represented.

Pupils are taught about:

1. Changes within living memory.
2. Events beyond living memory that are significant nationally or globally [for example, the Great Fire of London, the first aeroplane flight or events commemorated through festivals or anniversaries]
3. The lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements. [for example, Christopher Columbus and Neil Armstrong, and Florence Nightingale and Edith Cavell
4. Significant historical events, people and places in their own locality.

Curriculum Impact

By the end of Key Stage 1, pupils are expected to know, apply and understand the matters, skills and processes specified in the relevant programme of study. At Killamarsh Infant and Nursery School we use summative assessment to determine children’s understanding and inform teachers planning.