Queniborough
Primary School
Our curriculum leader for Geography is Mrs Worby.
Geography at Queniborough Primary School prepares young people with the knowledge, skills, and understanding to make sense of their world and to face the challenges that will shape our societies and environments at the local, national and global scales.
From the moment we are born, it is our instinct to begin to explore the world around us with all our senses.
From Spring Term 2024, we have been using the CUSP curriculum for Geography.
A guiding principle of CUSP Geography is that each study draws upon prior learning. For example, in the EYFS, pupils may learn about People, Culture and Communities or The Natural World through daily activities and exploring their locality and immediate environment. This is revisited and positioned so that new and potentially abstract content in Year 1 can be put into a known location and make it easier to cognitively process.
Pupils in EYFS explore globes and world locations through their curiosity corners, making links to where animals live. This substantive knowledge is used to remember and position the locations of continents and oceans, with more sophisticated knowledge. High volume and deliberate practice are essential for pupils to remember and retrieve substantive knowledge and use their disciplinary knowledge to explain and articulate what they know. This means pupils make conscious connections and think hard, using
what they know.
CUSP Geography is built around the principles of cumulative knowledge focusing on spaces, places, scale, human and physical processes with an emphasis on how content is connected and relational knowledge acquired. An example of this is the identification of continents, such as Europe, and its relationship to the location of the UK.
CUSP Geography equips pupils to become ‘more expert’ with each study and grow an ever broadening and coherent mental model of the subject. This guards against superficial, disconnected and fragmented geographical knowledge. Specific and associated geographical vocabulary is planned sequentially and
cumulatively from Year 1 to Year 6. High frequency, multiple meaning words (tier 2) are taught and help make sense of subject specific words (tier 3). Each learning module in geography has a vocabulary module with teacher guidance, tasks and resources.
CUSP Geography is planned so that the retention of knowledge is much more than just ‘in the moment knowledge’. The cumulative nature of the curriculum is made memorable by the implementation of Bjork’s desirable difficulties, including retrieval and spaced retrieval practice, word building and deliberate
practice tasks. This powerful interrelationship between structure and research-led practice is designed to increase substantive knowledge and accelerate learning within and between study modules. That means the foundational knowledge of the curriculum is positioned to ease the load on the working memory:
new content is connected to prior learning. The effect of this cumulative model supports opportunities for children to associate and connect with places, spaces, scale, people, culture and processes.
CUSP fulfils and goes well beyond the expectations of the National Curriculum since there is no ceiling to what pupils can learn if the architecture and practice is founded in evidence-led principles.
The aims of teaching geography at Queniborough Primary School are:
• To inspire pupils’ curiosity to discover more about where they live, Queniborough, and the world
• To enable children to know about the location of the world’s continents, countries, cities, seas, and oceans.
• To develop in children the skills of interpreting a range of sources of geographical information, including maps, diagrams, globes, aerial photographs, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
• To help children understand how the human and physical features of a place shape its location and can change over time.
