History

At the start

This all starts in the early years where child begin to build early schemas around past and present. Our EYFS children experience the topics studied through play based experiences. They begin to build constructs around their place of belonging and how this place links to historical events. The children learn about Olveston as cognitive pin point, helping act as a foundation to KS1. The topic children experience in EYFS are then built upon when they are in year 2.

By focusing on themselves and their immediate family and the changes that they have experienced within their lifetimes. This is then looked at in the context of their family’s lives. To build upon this chronology further, the children will then compare and contrast the lives of significant figures from further ago making them aware of a past beyond living memory.

The Second Phase

In Key Stage 2, we continue to build on knowledge of local history and think about our links to periods throughout History. OUR four main History Topics – WW2, The Victorian Era, The Anglo Saxons and Vikings, and the Roman Empire. We look at how these periods in history created such significant change. These studies will also build on children’s prior learning as they get a continued sense of the chronology of the history of Britain. Creating Key ‘chronological markers. The structure of OUR curriculum gives children experience and knowledge of empire, civilisations, significant events and significant historical people. Children are taught abought how historian studies the past.

The Olveston History Curriculum has three over-arching aims:

1. Children develop their specific historical knowledge – this can be of significant periods in history, historical figures and historical events.
2. Children develop chronological knowledge – how these periods in history, people in history and events sit within context to one another and the broader timeline.
3. Children have the skills of a historian – they can use sources of information, compare information, find similarities and differences, look at changes throughout history, think about why things happened, draw conclusions and question viewpoints.

What does this look like in the long term?

Children will 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

• Children will 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
• Children will gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’
• Children will 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
• Children will 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
• Children will 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.