The humanities area seeks to awaken a sense of wonder, fire the imagination and inspire learners to grow in knowledge, understanding and wisdom. At St John’s, we aim to give our children a humanities curriculum which enables them to become confident, creative and independent learners who can explore the use of different knowledge and skills throughout their learning. We seek to broaden children’s real-life experiences both inside and outside of school through educational visits, experience days, exploration and discovery. In the last year, we have worked very hard to design a curriculum which reflects our children’s heritages and expands their horizons. Within lessons, our children acquire a range of knowledge and skills in both history and geography which they can then apply to other subjects and in a variety of situations. Furthermore, it is our aim that through historical and geographical learning, children will become accountable citizens, understanding their role in protecting our world and environment and knowing how they can cause positive change and development as they grow.

Humanities encompasses geography and history. These disciplines share many common themes, concepts and transferable skills, while having their own discrete body of knowledge and skills. Throughout the year, each year group studies a variety of topics to allow our learning to focus on core subject specific knowledge and skills. Links across and between subjects give children a broad base of knowledge, facts, vocabulary, real-life experience and contexts to use for learning.

In Geography, children focus on 5 key areas of geography: location, place, human geography, physical geography, and map skills and fieldwork. In History, children focus on the core skills of chronology and sequencing. They also look at a range of different evidence in order to find out about the past, making links across periods and events in which they’ve studied. Within each topic, lessons follow carefully planned sequences which support children to build on their previous knowledge and skills whilst learning new content. Both history and geography lessons take various forms. Throughout our school there is a balance of practical, hands-on learning, research reading and written recording of knowledge.

 Where in the world does our learning take us...

 Where in time does our learning take us...