Geography at St Botolph's C of E Primary School:

Geography Lead: Mrs Devine

Geography Governor: Mrs West

The Intent:

To instil and encourage a natural curiosity and fascination about our local environment and the world to develop knowledge of places, investigate patterns and use geographical thinking to feel connected to our ever-changing world.

At St Botolph’s, we want our children to ‘strive to be the best they can’. Geography is relevant to our ever-changing world; we want our children to be inspired by this and to feel confident to question and discuss issues. In our diverse society, children need to understand other people and cultures more than ever before. Our intent is to instil and encourage a natural curiosity and fascination about the world to promote an interest of diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments alongside a secure understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes. Through revisiting these areas in our spiral curriculum, children will remember more, know more and understand more. It is essential that we give the children opportunities to grow spiritually, morally, socially and culturally. Children can develop in these areas as they learn Geography through practical experiences in preparation for exploring the world.

Geography Policy:

Our Aims

The aims of geography at St Botolph’s are:

• To stimulate children’s interest in their surroundings and develop knowledge and understanding of places in the world.
• To increase children’s knowledge of other cultures and in doing so, teach a respect and understanding of what it means to be a positive citizen in a multi-cultural country.
• To provide learning opportunities that enthuse, engage and motivate children to learn and foster a sense of curiosity and wonder at the beauty of the world around them.
• To allow children to learn graphic skills, including how to use, draw and interpret maps and to apply these skills to globes and atlas maps, identifying geographical features.
• To enable children to know and understand environmental problems at a local, regional and global level as well as being aware of their own surroundings through learning about their own locality.
• To encourage and instil in children a commitment to sustainable development and an appreciation of what ‘global citizenship’ means.
• To develop a variety of other skills, including those of enquiry, problem solving, computing, investigation and how to present conclusions and opinions.
• To enable children to work geographically in a range of appropriate contexts, using a variety of materials and equipment including other people’s experiences and knowledge.
• To develop the ability to use and apply geographical skills in other areas of the curriculum and in real life.

Geography Roadmap:

Our Curriculum:

We have used a combination of curriculum approaches to develop our Geography curriculum including The National Curriclum, Chris Quigley Essentials Curriculum and the e-learning resource Oddizzi. Oddizzi is a useful teaching tool which provides children with a range of learning approaches to develop their geographical understanding. There are videos, images, text, guided reading texts and quizzes which show the children the world through the eyes of people who are passionate about the places they are sharing. We use Digimap for Schools as an additional online mapping resource.

Feel free to explore our Oddizzi and Digimap resources through the links below:

The Teaching and Learning of Geography:

At St Botolph’s we teach geography every other week in topic blocks e.g. Term 1 Year 1 Weather and Climate. Topics are selected from Oddizzi and have been chosen to ensure that they deliver information as outlined in our milestones document. The milestones document contains the essential information from YR – Y6 to enable us to feel confident that we are supporting children in fully understanding and absorbing new information.

Oddizzi supports teachers with their medium and short-term planning. It provides teachers with key vocabulary, key skills and knowledge to plan high quality geography lessons. Our principal aim is to develop the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding in geography and Oddizzi provides teachers with the flexibility to uses a variety of teaching and learning styles. We believe in whole-class teaching methods and combine these with enquiry-based research activities. We encourage children to handle artefacts and to ask as well as answer geographical questions. We offer them the opportunity to use a variety of data, such as maps, statistics, graphs, pictures, aerial photographs, and geographical footage. Children take part in roleplay and discussions, and they present reports to the rest of the class. They engage in a wide variety of problem-solving activities. Wherever possible, we involve the children in ‘real’ geographical activities.

Celebrating Lincolnshire Day - October 2024

We really enjoyed celebrating Lincolnshire Day in school during October. Across the school, we gained an insight into Lincolnshire's food, farming, heritage, sports and culture. It was lovely to come together at the end of the day in a whole school worship to share the work each class had completed.

Year Five visited Lincolnshire Showground during the week of Lincolnshire Day where the children experienced multiple practical workshops and learning experiences.

Enjoy looking at the pictures below!