Geography

At Orgill Primary School we believe that geography is a vital element of our curriculum. It explores the inter-relationship between people and their environments across the globe and harnesses the innate curiosity and wonder that all children have regarding the natural world. Many of the future opportunities and challenges of today’s children will include an element of geography, whether this is at a personal, local scale such as combatting local flooding or a global scale such as understanding the cause and effect of population migration. Children leave Orgill Primary School as young geographers equipped with the knowledge and intellectual ability to ask and investigate questions about how and why a given place is like it is and the cause and effect of any changes. They leave with a sound foundation on which to build the next stage of their geography learning. 

We teach geography as a discrete subject using CUSP Geography and all pupils have the equivalent of one hour of geography teaching per week during alternate half terms. Key stage one lessons are taught daily, whereas in key stage two, lessons are taught weekly.

A guiding principle of CUSP Geography is that each study draws upon prior learning.  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).