Mereside Academy

Geography

Intent

At Mereside we recognise that Geographical knowledge and skills can help drive feelings of self-worth, an idea about where we fit in this world, a fascination in the world in which we live and a strong desire to protect and improve it. 

Geography at Mereside has been planned considering the children first.  We want to choose topics that not only cover the national curriculum but also inspire, inform and draw on experiences of the children.  We have a curriculum that deliberately celebrates the diversity of natural landscapes, climates and cultures of plant Earth.  We believe strongly that knowledge and skills embedded through foundation subjects such as Geography can help increase a child’s ability to improve literacy and maths skills.  With this in mind there are regular links with key English texts studied and opportunities to use mathematical skills and use these to draw conclusions about places we study thus making learning a personal and real experience.  There are links with other areas of the curriculum including History, Science and RE.  The purpose of this is once again to provide opportunities to build knowledge, ease working memory and free up the brain to be making connections and asking questions.  

We endeavour to build in opportunities to steadily make manageable steps into the next stage of learning.  Harder concepts and skills from the National Curriculum are returned to throughout the child’s experiences and carefully planned right through from Reception to Year Six this is so that we can be deliberately ambitious in the questions and learning opportunities we provide the children.  As a subject we want to use field work and real life experiences as much as possible and in order to do this local area Geography is returned to in each Key stage. 

Finally as a church school we believe that love is at the heart of all that we do and in terms of Geography we hope this love is expressed through how we want to become, caring citizen who consider human’s impact on our natural world and do whatever we can to be knowledgeable enough to make decisions that impact our world positively.

Implementation

In order to achieve our Intent for Geography we have chosen these units specifically to address these areas of our school curriculum. Our skills and progression document sets out how we achieve the Geography programme of study at Mereside.